
Cfass_K^L. L 
Book_iJl 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



THE LITERATURE 

OF 

THE GEORGIAN ERA 



BY 



/ 



WILLIAM MINTO 



PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LOGIC IN THE 
UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN 



EDITED 
WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION BY 

WILLIAM KNIGHT, LL.D. 

FROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE 

UNIVERSITY OK ST. ANDREWS 




0£W/« 



NEW YORK 

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

1 895 



K. 






Copyright, 1894, by Harper & Brothers. 
All righta reserved. 




PREFACE 



The following lectures by Professor Minto on 
" The Literature of the Georgian Era " were origi- 
nally delivered, not to the Arts students whom 
he addressed in the University class-room, but 
to a special audience brought together in the 
Music Hall of Aberdeen, under the auspices of 
the Local Examination Committee of the Senatus 
Academicus. This will explain why some points 
are treated in greater detail than would have 
been necessary in addressing advanced students. 
As explained in the Introduction, to Mr. John 
H. Lobban belongs the credit — as he had all the 
labor — of looking up and copying out the illus- 
trative extracts from the authors referred to or 
criticized by his master. 

In addition to these Lectures, and us a cognate 
Supplement, it has been thought expedient to 
publish three essays by Professor Minto, which 
were ready for press before his death, and were 
meant by him to be included in a work to be en- 
titled "Reconsiderations of some Current Concep- 
tions about Eminent Poets." Two of them are 
devoted to Pope, the former being a criticism of 
Mr. Courthope's Biography, and the latter a 
noteworthy discussion on "The Supposed Tyr- 
anny of Pope." These were contributed to Mac- 
millarts Magazine in January, 1890, and Sep- 



IV PREFACE 

tember, 1888, and the right of reproducing them 
has been generously conceded by the owners of 
the copyright. The other, on Burns, has not 
been previously published. It was delivered as 
a lecture before the Edinburgh Philosophical In- 
stitution. In reference to it, as Mr. Lobban tells 
us, Professor Minto said that it was "most dis- 
tinctly the best thing " that he had ever written. 
The projected "Reconsiderations" would have 
included, among others, an essay on John Donne, 
two papers on Wordsworth, — originally contrib- 
uted to the Nineteenth Century, — and another on 
" Matthew Arnold's Meliorism." As the last of 
these does not fall within the literature of the 
era included in the lectures which follow, and 
the first belongs to a previous period, while 
Wordsworth has been discussed in the course of 
this volume, these papers are not included in 
the Supplement. 

W. K. 



CONTENTS 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRDOUCTION IX 

LECTURES 
CHAPTEE I 

THE POSITION OF MEN OF LETTERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

Decline of royal patronage — Why is the Georgian Era a distinct 
literary period? — Condition of poetry during the century, and 
views of its critics as to the meaning of nature 1 

CHAPTER II 

POPE 

Brief literary biography — His poems fall into three periods — 
Eclogues, and the discussion as to the merits of pastoral 
poetry — Walsh — Connection between English pastorals and 
Allan Ramsay and Burns— Pope and Philips 21 

CHAPTER III 

pope— continued 

"Essay on Criticism" — Supposed tyranny of Pope — Attitude of 
Pope, Gray, etc., toward classical tradition — Review of theories 
accounting for the poetic sterility of the eighteenth century . 35 

CHAPTER TV 

pope — continued 

Influence of ideas on poetry — Spirit of the age — Influence of 

society on Pope — Gay's ballads 47 

CHAPTER V 

A GROUP OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETS 

Thomson — Early life — Descriptive poetry generally — "Winter" — 

Thomson's position in poetry — Dyer and Somerville .... 58 



VI CONTENTS 

CHAPTER VI 

pope— continued 

PAGE 

As a satirist and moralist — Failure in epic poetry — " The Dun- 

ciad" — " Essay on Man" 72 

CHAPTER VII 

POETRY BETWEEN POPE AND COWPER 

Glover— Johnson — Collins — The poet and the orator — Gray . . 80 
CHAPTER VIII 

DECLINE OF POETRY — THE NOVEL 

Walpole's criticism — Why the want of poetry was not felt — Diary 
of a lady of quality — Rise of the novel — " Pamela " — Connec- 
tion with magazine literature — Fielding — historical novels— 
" The Castle of Otranto " 99 

CHAPTER IX 

the novel — continued 

Influence of Percy's " Reliques " and Ossian— Miss Burney and the 

lady novelists 114 

CHAPTER X 

THE NEW POETRY 

Cowper — His alleged revolution of poetry 129 

CHAPTER XI 

SCOTTISH POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

The elevation of a dialect into a literary language — Influence of 
old ballads — Watson's " Collection" — Allan Ramsay — The Easy 
Club — "The Gentle Shepherd" — Song-writers— Skinner, 
etc. — Fergusson — Burns 146 

CHAPTER Xn 

WORDSWORTH 

Connection with previous poetry— Sketch of life— " Lyrical 

Ballads" 164 

CHAPTER XIII 

Wordsworth — continued 
" The Idiot Boy "—Prose v. Poetry— Coleridge on Wordsworth . 182 



CONTENTS Vii 

CHAPTER XIV 

PAGE 

Wordsworth (continued)— Coleridge— southey 199 

CHAPTER XV 

CAMPBELL — MOOBE 

Campbell — "Pleasures of Hope " — Thomas Moore — The last of the 
•Joculators — Moore's social environment — His jocose and 
maudlin veins 217 

CHAPTER XVI 

SCOTT 

Influence of old ballads— Summary of life — Poems 235 

CHAPTER XVII 

BYRON 

Summary of life— Popular identification of the poet with his crea- 
tions — " English Bards and Scotch Reviewers " 253 

CHAPTER XVIII 

NOVELISTS FROM MRS. RADCLIFFE TO BULWER LYTTON 

Sterne — Miss Edgeworth— Hannah More — Jane Austen— "Waver- 
ley"— Miss Mitford— Mrs. Shelley— " Vivian Grey"— "Pel- 
ham" 275 

CHAPTER XIX 

SHELLEY AND KEATS 

Shelley — Various conceptions of the poet — Character — Keats — The 
reviewers — Characteristics of his poetry — "Endymion" and 
"Hyperion" 292 

SUPPLEMENT 

I. MR. COURTHOPE's BIOGRAPHY OF POPE 307 

II. THE SUPPOSED TYRANNY OF POPE 326 

III. THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS 343 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 



In the year 1890 I asked Professor Minto to 
contribute a volume on "Logic, Inductive and 
Deductive," to the series of " University Man- 
uals ' ' which I had organized some time previously, 
and was then editing. It was not completed till 
shortly before his death, but the proof had been 
revised by himself in all its details; and it 
seemed only loyal to his memory to send it to the 
press in the exact form in which he left it. 

It has now fallen to me to edit a volume of 
Jus Lectures on the Literature of the Georgian 
Period ; and, although they would have been 
greatly altered and recast had he lived to see 
them through the press, it is now inexpedient to 
do more than correct clerical errors in transcrip- 
tion. Mr. Lobban, — who acted as Professor Min- 
to' s assistant for some time, and whose estimate 
of his master will be found in a later page, — has 
been good enough to go over these Lectures with 
the same end in view. 

At the request of Mrs. Minto I agreed to edit 
this book, and to write a brief introductory 
sketch of my late friend. We differed on many 
points, — philosophical, literary, political, artistic, 
and social, — but I never knew any man with 
whom recognized differences counted for less, so 
far as personal esteem was concerned. Indeed, 



X BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

our differences enhanced my regard for him 
every time we met. 

He was not only the most chivalrous of intel- 
lectual opponents, but the most appreciative ; 
and he had the rare gift of presenting to those 
who differed from him the very doctrine from 
which they dissented, and the kernel of the posi- 
tion from which they stood aloof, in a non-con- 
troversial and attractive manner. 

I have never known a more genial, generous, or 
upright man than Professor Minto. He never 
alluded to the points on which men differed from 
him in reference to ultimata, as expressed in 
their published writings ; and, so far as friendly 
intercourse was concerned, these differences were 
as though they were not. He instinctively met 
every one on his own level, sympathetically ap- 
preciating truth and excellence wherever he 
found them. This characteristic came out most 
notably in his comments on those who had mis- 
construed, and even opposed, him. I never heard 
him say an unkind word of any opponent. 

The first occasion on which we met was at a 
University Extension Conference which was 
being held in Glasgow, and to which those repre- 
sentatives of the four Scottish Universities who 
had interested themselves in the work as organ- 
izers or secretaries, etc., were invited. There 
was one person in the room whom I did not know ; 
and he seemed to know no one present from 
Edinburgh, Glasgow, or St. Andrews. But, ob- 
serving this silent man with a noticeable coun- 
tenance sitting in the background and in a corner 
of the room, I went up to him and asked him 
what University he represented. As soon as he 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION XI 

had introduced himself he was asked to help in 
the organization of a comprehensive plan of 
University Extension for Scotland at large. Ab- 
erdeen had, up to that time, taken no active part 
in the movement ; and Professor Minto was the 
first to interest himself in it, which he did with 
much ardor, offering many important sugges- 
tions. He came to St. Andrews to discuss that 
and other things with me, and soon became an 
intimate friend. 

I can never forget the days he spent at Edge- 
cliffe and my repeated visits to him afterward 
at Aberdeen, our talks on Philosophy and Liter- 
ature — far beyond the summer night and into 
early morning — in his house at Westfield Terrace, 
our golf matches on the Links, and social inter- 
course with friends at the Club or in his most 
genial home. 

As I was a friend of his later years it seemed 
appropriate to follow the plan which I pursued 
in the case of the late Principal Shairp of St. 
Andrews, and to place together a series of pho- 
tographic sketches — taken from opposite points 
of view — of the character, genius, and career of a 
remarkable man, by his earlier friends and more 
intimate pupils. These tributes have been ren- 
dered spontaneously, and given very cordially. 

I do not feel it incumbent on me to characterize 
his work in Philosophy, or his contributions to 
Literature, in detail. It will suffice to record one 
or two things which were written before these 
admirable character-sketches by others reached 
me. 

I consider it not the least merit in Professor 
Minto' s career that, while a man of letters par 



xii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

excellence, — and for many years diverted from 
Philosophy to Literature by his work as a Jour- 
nalist, and a critic of men and public measures, — 
he succeeded, during his tenure of it, in making 
the Aberdeen Chair, with its dual claims, quite 
as distinguished in the department of Philosophy 
as in that of Literature. All students bear wit- 
ness to this. His book on " Logic, Inductive and 
Deductive," is as original and bright as that of 
any writer on the subject in Great Britain during 
the last quarter of a century. In all probability 
his previous life as a journalist not only con- 
firmed that rare capacity for work which dis- 
tinguished him as an undergraduate, but fitted 
him for popularizing an abstruse subject, and 
keeping his exposition of it free from the techni- 
calities which have so often disfigured the treat- 
ment of Logic. The fact that he had been no 
mean power in the literary circles of the south 
gave a special weight to what he said from his 
academic chair ; and while the bejants of the 
north found that they had before them, in the 
English Literature class, a Teacher of whose 
achievements among his contemporaries it 
might be truly said, — although he would never 
have said it, nor thought it,— pars magna fui, 
the students of Philosophy found that they were 
being taught by an original mind, and not by a 
mere expositor of school Logic. 

A wonderful critic of his "Logic" has com- 
plained of its "laxity of reference to Greek writers 
and to modern," and has added that the editor 
should have supplied a bibliography, and index, 
and notes, and references, etc. He has even 
doubted whether it should ever have had a place in 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION Xlll 

such a Series ! But the ways of reviewers are 
inscrutable. To none of the authors whom I asked 
to co-operate in this series of Manuals was it a 
greater satisfaction to me to delegate work than to 
hand over this volume to Professor Minto ; and 
its success, both in this country and in America, 
has been marked. It has a value of its own 
which has already made it useful in University 
and College class-rooms, being one of the freshest 
and most stimulating books which our British 
philosophical literature has received for many 
years. 

As a contribution to logical science, its Intro- 
duction will probably be welcomed generations 
hence by students of the subject when dry-as- 
dust logicians are forgotten. To be taught how 
to escape from illusion and fallacy of every kind, 
so as to get into the light of reality, is no small 
gain to the student of evidence ; and there can be 
little doubt that Professor Minto' s book— while 
a reflection of the work done by him in the Logic 
class-room of Aberdeen for thirteen years — will 
be found one of the best handbooks introductory 
to the study of Philosophy for those who cannot 
resort to a University, and for whose assistance 
these Manuals were originally designed. 

In Philosophy Minto was singularly open to 
light from every quarter. I often told him that 
he was more eclectic than I was. When discuss- 
ing the ideal and the real in Philosophy or in 
Art, he always proved himself one of the most 
fair-minded of men, a reconciler of differences, 
and as ready to recognize merit from the most 
opposite quarters as any disciple of the school 
of a 'priori thought. 



XIV BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

The range of his knowledge and culture was 
almost encyclopaedic, as was that of his friend 
and rival Robertson Smith ; so that, like the late 
Professor Trail of Edinburgh — editor of the sev- 
enth edition of the" Encyclopaedia Britannica" — 
he was probably the only man in the University 
who could have been trusted on an emergency to 
conduct the class of any one of his colleagues if 
he were accidentally laid aside from duty. 

It is a noteworthy circumstance that, when it 
was finally determined to separate the subjects of 
Logic and Literature in the University of Aber- 
deen, a memorial was addressed to Professor 
Minto, signed by 350 of his former pupils, asking 
him to accept the Chalmers Chair of English 
Literature. 

The lectures published in this volume, which 
have been printed from Professor Minto' s own 
MSS., are a very inadequate index of the extent 
of his knowledge, or his critical insight into the 
more delicate problems which arise in the study 
of English Literature ; but, as he meant to recast 
them with a view to publication, they are sent 
forth in the belief that they contain literary 
judgments which he would himself have ratified 
in any subsequent work. At the same time, I 
believe that there are articles of William Minto' s, 
I should not say buried, but — for the mass of 
readers — lost, in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," 
The Nineteenth Century, and other magazines, 
which, in their critical vision, their wise insight, 
and felicitous appraisal of authors little known 
(or at least little read), are greatly superior to 
those put together in this volume for the first 
time. There are papers on Wordsworth, and 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION XV 

other magnates in our great English hierarchy, 
which will be found as valuable to posterity as 
the critical notices of any of our modern re- 
viewers. In addition there are numerous Intro- 
ductory Lectures delivered to his class, — such as 
those on "The English Language," on "The 
Usefulness of Plodding," on "Industry," and 
others delivered to literary societies in the north ; 
that on "K., B., and Q.," or three new novel- 
ists (they were Kipling, Barrie, and Quiller- 
Couch), — which would adorn another volume of 
his, remains. 

As Minto's knowledge was not derived from 
secondary sources, his criticism was invariably 
at first hand. I was often struck with his 
knowledge of out-of-the-way authors. He could 
quote "The Day's Estival " as readily as he 
showed his knowledge of the writings of Thomas, 
ex Albiis. These delightful days at Aberdeen, 
when — after a round of the Links — we used to 
watch the fleet of boats going out from the har- 
bor to the herring fishing, and talk of Meta- 
physics or of Literature, vividly recall to me 
how glad Minto was to be ultimately relieved 
from what became — to a temperament like his — 
the drudgery of editorship. I nevertheless be- 
lieve that his training in the editorial chair, 
and his varied literary work in London, devel- 
oped his unique fitness for the work he did at 
the University. It prevented him from ever 
being pedantic. It gave simplicity, piquancy, 
and diversity to his style ; and to it is greatly 
owing the fact that, in all his subsequent exposi- 
tions of the abstruser matters of Philosophy, he 
was untechnical, and even vernacular. 



XVI BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

In the following brief sketch of his life I avail 
myself of notes derived from several quarters. 

William Minto was born at Nether Auchin- 
toul, Alford, on the 10th of October, 1845, the 
farm then occupied by his father. He was sent 
to Gallowhill school, near Alford, which he left 
in May, 1854, going for six months to the parish 
school of Tough. In November, 1854, his father 
entered upon the tenancy of the farm of Little- 
mill, Auchterless, and the son was sent to a 
private school at Bruckhills in the neighborhood. 
Here he remained for two years, after which he 
went for a year to the Episcopal school at Fisher- 
ford, Culsalmond. In 1857 his parents removed 
to Huntly, where William was taught in the 
Gordon Schools under a very able master, the 
Rev. John Macdonald, who gave him a thorough 
training in classics as a preparation for the bur- 
sary competition at the University of Aberdeen. 
He cherished the memory of this teacher to the 
last, entertaining for him the greatest admiration 
and regard. 

Before giving an outline of his College career 
an explanation of the constant race between him 
and the late Robertson Smith, the distinguished 
Professor of Arabic at Cambridge, is desirable. 
He went to College in the winter of 1861-62, at 
the age of sixteen, his means of preparation 
being such as already indicated. Robertson 
Smith was two years his senior ; and, by his 
father's arrangement as a matter of policy, was 
kept at home studying to the very utmost under 
himself, he being one of the best teachers of the 
day, accomplished both in mathematics and clas- 
sics. The consequence was that Smith carried 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION XV11 

off the first bursary with comparative ease, his 
Latin version being perfect, sine errore, in every 
respect — probably as good a version as the clas- 
sical master could have produced. Minto, with 
his inferior advantages, was able to carry off the 
Moir bursary of fifteen pounds. The disparity in 
years and means of training made the start of the 
two competitors necessarily unequal ; and it was 
by an extraordinary strain of application that 
Minto was able, in a very short time, to equal, and 
even to surpass, Robertson Smith in some of the 
subjects. At the end of the first year his work 
had been such that he took the eighth prize in 
Latin, and the second in Greek. In English he 
only attained a third place in the order of merit. 
Professor Bain writes : "In the English class 
one incident occurred which constituted the first 
occasion of my taking notice of his personality. 
I began in that year the system of setting in 
writing two essays a week, and engaged an as- 
sistant to read them. The only person that I 
could find as an assistant to begin with, before I 
got advanced pupils of my own, was an assistant 
librarian in the College. The out-of-door essays 
I made him examine and value, and also indicate 
errors, so that they might be returned. After 
giving them back one day Minto came up to 
me at the end of the hour, and showed me his 
paper with some red ink marks under portions 
of it, which was the mode of indicating some 
error or want of correctness. He asked me to 
tell him what that meant. I looked at it, and I 
found that there was really nothing to correct in 
the matter at all ; and the incident showed me 
that the assistant was not to be trusted with the 



XV1U BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

function of indicating errors, so as to enable me 
to return the essays ; and from that time forward 
I ceased the practice." 

In the Honors examinations Minto had a first 
in Classics, a second in Mental Philosophy, and 
a second in Mathematical Science — a triple 
honor, never before or since accomplished. As 
prizes he carried off the Simpson in Greek and 
the Boxhill in Mathematics ; he also obtained 
the Hutton prize (which was awarded for dis- 
tinction both in Classics and in Philosophy) — 
the total money value of the prizes being £110. 

He graduated as Master of Arts in 1865, and 
afterward obtained the Ferguson scholarship in 
Classics, open to graduates of all the Scottish 
Universities. 

In the session of 1865-66 he attended the Di- 
vinity Hall, and in the summer of 1866 went to 
Merton College, Oxford, where he obtained an 
exhibition of eighty pounds. 

His experience at Oxford seemed to impress 
him with the inexpediency of pursuing his 
studies there, and he resolved to leave it at the 
end of the year, which he did, without taking 
the Oxford degree. He seemed to think that to 
wait for a Fellowship at Merton would not be so 
advantageous to him as to go south to the me- 
tropolis, or to return to Scotland. 

In the autumn of 1867 he was undecided as to 
his future ; but, owing to his distinction in 
Science, as well as in Classics and Philosophy, an 
offer was made to him by Mr. David Thomson, the 
Professor of Natural Philosophy in Aberdeen, to 
become his endowed assistant — an office to which 
a salary of one hundred pounds a year was at- 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xix 

tached. The engagement seemed to give satisfac- 
tion to both parties, and he entered upon his duties 
in the following November. The only thing doubt- 
ful was whether he had that sort of handicraft 
skill required in an assistant who had to take 
part in experimental work, and that, of course, 
remained to be tested. The engagement, how- 
ever, came to an abrupt termination in December, 
the occasion being Minto's refusal to take part 
in the experiment of subjecting himself to an 
electric shock, so as to excite the laughter of the 
students, which he considered derogatory to his 
position as an assistant. It is unnecessary to 
discuss the details of this unfortunate affair 
further than to say that he objected, and rightly, 
"to be made part and parcel of the class appa- 
ratus." When released from this post he was 
appointed temporarily by Professor Bain as his 
English class assistant, and to give various aid in 
connection with certain books which he then had 
in hand. With this occupation Minto began his 
volume on " English Prose Composition," which 
he wrote exclusively in Aberdeen during the 
course of the next three years, having the re- 
sources of the University library at his command 
for the purpose. The work appeared in 1872. 

During the four years which he now spent at 
Aberdeen Minto was active in a variety of ways 
in connection with the University, although not 
one of its recognized officials. He took a note- 
worthy part in the work of the University Liter- 
ary Society, which was founded in 1871, and of 
which he was elected president in 1872. He was 
also an active organizer in rectorial contests, al- 
though he had not himself a vote. The election 



XX BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

which occurred during his stay in Aberdeen re- 
sulted in the return of Mountstuart Grant Duff 
for the second time in 1869. There was a close 
contest. The majority was a very narrow one, — 
only twelve, — indeed, it was found that there was 
a tie of Nations, and the Duke of Richmond and 
Gordon gave the casting vote in favor of Sir 
William Maxwell, who, seeing there was dissatis- 
faction with the mode in which the election had 
been made, magnanimously declined to accept 
office, and allowed Mr. Grant Duff to be elected. 
Minto's influence was very marked and power- 
ful, so much so that but for him Mr. Grant Duff 
would have failed. 

In 1872 there was a vacancy in the representa- 
tion of the University Council in the Court, and 
it was again due to his untiring energy that the 
Rev. John Christie, minister of Kildrummy, was 
elected. 

In 1872 the examinership in Mental Philosophy 
at Aberdeen became vacant, and Minto became a 
candidate. His friends in the Court were the 
Rector, the Rector's Assessor, and the Assessor 
to the General Council, all of whom may be said 
to have owed their standing to his exertions in 
their behalf at the different elections. His secur- 
ing the appointment as Examiner was an impor- 
tant step in his future career, being the beginning 
of his systematic studies in Philosophy, while his 
other work was more exclusively in connection 
with English Literature. 

In the following year (1873) he left Aberdeen, 
and went up to London to engage in literary 
work. He obtained a post on The Examiner 
newspaper, and in its columns he wrote, with 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION XXI 

special force and clearness, on John Stuart Mill, 
on the occasion of his death in May, 1873. His 
article was one of a series of character-sketches 
on Mill, to which Herbert Spencer, Mr. Frederick 
Harrison, Professors Henry Fawcett and Cairns 
also contributed. Later in that year The Ex- 
aminer was purchased by Mr. Peter Taylor, the 
Radical Member of Parliament for Leicester. Mr. 
Minto was selected as literary editor, and in 1874 as 
editor-in-chief. The Examiner had been started 
by Leigh Hunt in the earlier years of the present 
century. To it Charles Lamb, Shelley, Hazlitt, 
Haydon, and John Forster had contributed. It 
was edited for some time by M. Albany Fon- 
blanque ; but it had almost failed about the year 
1870, when it was revived as the organ of philo- 
sophical Radicalism. It was, however, a literary 
as well as a political journal ; and Mr. Minto 
had very able coadjutors in both departments, 
such men as Mr. John MacDonnell and Mr. 
William A. Hunter being among them. With 
all its ability, however, The Examiner did not 
succeed. It had a very formidable rival in the 
ablest of all the weekly papers of Great Britain — 
The Spectator. Mr. Taylor sold the property to 
Lord Rosebery, Mr. Minto remaining co-editor 
along with Mr. Robert Williams until 1878. When 
the paper was finally discontinued in 1880, Minto 
turned to purely political writing in The Daily 
News. He afterward wrote in The Pall Mall 
Gazette (under the editorship of Mr. John Mor- 
ley), to which newspaper he was a regular con- 
tributor until he left London. While living as a 
journalist in London Minto took a prominent 
part in political controversy, especially in con- 



XX11 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

nection with England's relations to the East, and 
the war in Afghanistan. He was the first to use 
a term which soon became a current coin in 
political writing — the term "jingo." As he 
once told his students : " I am under the impres- 
sion that I was the first to give the currency of 
respectable print to the chorus of the song, ' We 
don't want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we do,' and 
so forth," which was first made use of in an edi- 
torial article in The Daily JYews. 

During his seven years in the metropolis his 
literary, other than newspaper, work resulted in 
the publication of "Characteristics of English 
Poets" in 1874, and "Defoe," in the English 
Men of Letters Series, in 1879, besides miscella- 
neous contributions to various periodicals, such as 
The Nineteenth Century, The Fortnightly Re- 
view, Macmillan, Blackwood, and The English 
Illustrated Magazine. It may be noted that 
Mr. Edmund Gosse was, for a time, the sub- 
editor of The Examiner, and that Minto was the 
first to persuade Mr. Theodore Watts to devote 
himself to literature. 

He was early engaged by Professor Thomas 
Spenser Baynes, the late editor of the " Encyclo- 
pedia Britannica," to contribute to its pages, and 
his contributions are to be found in most of the 
volumes of that Encyclopaedia. In alphabetical 
order they were as follows : Byron, Chaucer, 
Dickens, Dryden, Fielding, Lytton, Mandeville, 
J. S. Mill, Minstrel, Moore, Poe, Pope, Reade, 
Scott, Sheridan, Sydney Smith, Smollett, Spen- 
ser, Steele, Sterne, James Thomson, Waller, 
Izaak Walton, Warton, and Wordsworth. 

In 1880 Professor Bain retired from the Chair 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION XX111 

of Logic and English Literature in the University 
of Aberdeen, and Minto became Ms successor. 
In that year he married Miss Cornelia Griffiths, 
daughter of the Rector of Swindon, in Glouces- 
tershire. When called to Aberdeen he devoted 
himself with rare assiduity to both branches of 
his Chair, although it was evident that the 
English section was what he liked best, and what 
he most excelled in. During the thirteen years 
that he held office in the University his literary 
activity was great. He published three romances : 
"The Crack of Doom," which appeared first in 
Blackwood 's Magazine in 1886, and was repub- 
lished in three volumes in 1886 ; "The Mediation 
of Ralph Hardelot," contributed to The English 
Illustrated Magazine, and published in book 
form in 1888 ; and " Was She Good or Bad ? " in 
1889. In 1886 he brought out an admirable edi- 
tion of Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel" for 
the Clarendon Press, with notes, and in 1891 an 
edition of " The Lady of the Lake." In 1887 he 
edited a complete edition of Sir Walter's Poems 
for Messrs. A. & C. Black. During his later years 
in Aberdeen he was also a frequent contributor 
to several of the London literary weeklies, not- 
ably to The Bookman. The posthumous volume 
on " Logic," already referred to, contains the best 
part of his teaching in the Philosophical class- 
room of the University of Aberdeen. 
In the Preface to that work he wrote : 

In this little treatise two things are attempted that 
at first might appear incompatible. One of them is to 
put the study of logical formulas on a historical basis. 
Strangely enough, the scientific evolution of logical 



XXIV BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

forms is a bit of history that still awaits the zeal and 
genius of some great scholar. I have neither ambition 
nor qualification for such a magnum o]ncs, and my life 
is already more than half spent ; but the gap in evo- 
lutionary research is so obvious that doubtless some 
younger man is now at work in the field unknown to me. 
All that I can hope to do is to act as a humble pioneer 
according to my imperfect lights. Even the little I 
have done represents work begun more than twenty 
years ago, and continuously pursued for the last twelve 
years during a considerable portion of my time. 

The other aim, which might at first appear inconsist- 
ent with this, is to increase the power of Logic as a 
practical discipline. The main purpose of this practical 
science, or scientific art, is conceived to be the organi- 
zation of reason against error, and error in its various 
kinds is made the basis of the division of the subject. 
To carry out this practical aim along with the historical 
one is not hopeless, because throughout its long history 
Logic has been a practical science ; and, as I have tried 
to show at some length in introductory chapters, has 
concerned itself at different periods with the risks of 
error peculiar to each. 

An earlier work, issued the year before he died, 
the "Autobiographical Notes of the Life of 
William Bell Scott," is a book of great value, as 
bearing on a wide circle of writers in Literature 
and Art. The varied information there contained 
as to such men as David Scott, Dante Rossetti, 
Samuel Brown, Holman Hunt, Thomas Woolner, 
Carlyle, and others, is of the highest literary 
importance. 

Minto's health was weakened before 1890. He 
often suffered from asthma, and in 1891 he was 
induced to try the effect of a sea voyage in the 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION XXV 

Mediterranean, which refreshed him for a time. 
His academic and literary activity knew no 
intermission till he finally succumbed to a com- 
plication of ailments on the 1st of March, 1893. 
Had he survived to see, and to profit by, the 
changes introduced by the University Commis- 
sion into the curriculum of study at Aberdeen, 
he would have found in the new Chair of English 
a field for his energies, in which he would have 
probably enriched the literature of his country 
in many ways. With a wide knowledge of 
philosophy, and a thoroughgoing philosophic 
discipline behind, he might have been expected 
to do as much as any of his contemporaries to 
advance the study of English in the land of his 
birth, and in his own alma mater, while the 
northern University would have felt his power 
in the consideration of all matters of academic 
policy. 

Minto's death, although not altogether unex- 
pected, was a shock, not only to the city of 
Aberdeen, but to the country at large. Every 
Professor in the University on hearing of it 
made a sympathetic allusion to their common 
loss, and dismissed his class for the day. I ex- 
tract the following account of his funeral from a 
local journal : 

A more inspiring ceremonial, and one that brought 
from their homes a more than usually large gathering 
of the public, of all ranks, has not been witnessed in 
Aberdeen than that which attended the funeral of Pro- 
fessor Minto yesterday. The obsequies were of a pub- 
lic character, and among the varied representatives that 
followed the mournful procession from Marischal College 



XXVI BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

to Allanvale Cemetery there was a very large number 
of the deceased Professor's academical and other 
friends. The plate bore the inscription, " William 
Minto, born Oct. 10th, 1845, died March 1st, 1893." The 
coffin was carried to the grave on the shoulders of four 
shore porters. Long before the procession started from 
Marischal College both sides of Union Street were 
densely lined with the populace, who waited patiently 
for nearly an hour to catch a last glimpse of the remains 
being carried to the grave. Funeral service was con- 
ducted in the Upper and Lower Halls, the professors, 
students, and varied University bodies assembling. The 
shop and dwelling-house window-blinds along the 
streets through which the procession passed were drawn 
down, and as the coffin passed the hats of spectators 
were respectfully raised all along the route. The 
weather was warm, — very un-March-like, — and at in- 
tervals a bright sun shone, revealing the early breath 
of spring. As the cortdge moved through the streets 
the deep and solemn note of Victoria pealed at regular 
intervals from the tower of St. Nicholas' steeple. 

Mr. W. Kobertson Nicoll, the editor of The 
Bookman and other papers, sends me the follow- 
ing most appreciative paper : 

Minto was one of the most brilliant and industrious 
students Aberdeen University has ever known. He 
was one of three concerning whom a Professor said 
that none of them would ever see fifty. Their consti- 
tutions were not robust, and they were of eager, un- 
resting temperament. 

The natural thing for Minto would have been to 
enter at an English University, and he made the attempt. 
But it did not suit him, and after a short trial he also 
gave up Divinity. It was a bold step in these days to 
take up literature as a profession, but, having made up 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION XXV11 

his mind, he prepared himself with business-like thor- 
oughness. He wrote articles and reviews in one of the 
Aberdeen newspapers {The Herald). Here, perhaps 
for the only time in his life, he occasionally gave rein 
to his great powers of sarcasm ; but, for the most part, 
his criticisms were genial. He set himself to write 
books on literary history. In these he made the simple 
but unusual preparation of reading the authors he was 
to deal with. The result is that his " Manual " and his 
" Characteristics " are perhaps the most thoroughly origi- 
nal works of their kind. Minto did not, in the first in- 
stance, read criticisms of authors ; he went to the 
fountainhead. In the case of some authors, — notably 
De Quincey, — his research was of the most elaborate 
kind. At the time when his volume was published 
Minto probably knew more of De Quincey's work than 
any other critic. Another study he took pleasure in 
was that of Sir Roger de Coverley. He contended and 
proved that all that is amiable in the character belongs 
to Steele. 

While diligently occupied at this work, Minto found 
time to be president of the University Literary Society 
— a body composed of graduates and other members of 
the University. As Vice-President I had many oppor- 
tunities of meeting him, and the association ripened 
into intimacy. Like all who really knew Minto, I soon 
came to estimate his character even above his abili- 
ties. I have never known so equitable a mind. Though 
a man of strong convictions and warm feelings, he was 
pre-eminently just, patient, and generous. He could 
make allowance for his bitterest opponents ; and was 
quick to recognize the merits of those farthest from him 
in opinion. Even if he depreciated any man, he soon 
began to recall redeeming traits. This equitableness of 
temper is what rises up and remains to me at every 
remembrance of Minto. He had also much bonhotnie, 
and was singularly courteous to every one. In these 



XXV111 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

gatherings of students he was seen at his best, and it 
was his special delight to encourage and befriend be- 
ginners. 

When he went to edit Tlie Examiner his old friends 
in Aberdeen followed his work with warm interest. I 
am sure he has never had justice done to his editorial 
ability. The Examiner was in low water, and in these 
days new ideas in journalism were not favored. Possibly 
its politics were too advanced for readers of the class 
it appealed to. But Minto was in his way a great 
editor. He introduced the features which mark the 
new sixpenny reviews — signed articles, stories, sketches, 
and miscellaneous paragraphs. For new writers he was 
always on the outlook, and Mr. Theodore Watts and 
Mr. Edmund Gosse were among the young critics he 
brought forward. Dr. Garnett's exquisite criticism 
was often to be recognized. For the work of woman 
he had a warm welcome ; Mrs. Augusta Webster was 
one of many lady contributors. But the comparative 
failure of the paper from a commercial standpoint dis- 
couraged him. He had great pleasure in thinking of 
his literary associations and friendships ; but the work 
of editing was to him a "disagreeable business," and he 
scarcely understood how any one could like it. 

Of his career as a Professor others will speak. I 
believe he bridged the gulf which for long stretched so 
wide between Aberdeen students and their teachers. It 
was easy to see that his heart was in his work and with 
his pupils. 

In later years I saw him frequently. Even when in 
delicate health, and worried by controversies not of his 
seeking, he was what I had always known him — un- 
alterably true to his convictions, generous in his judg- 
ment of opponents, unwearied in labor, and eagerly 
interested in literature — old and new. At our last 
meeting he talked of the writers who had influenced 
Dickens. I happened to say that John Poole, author of 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION XXIX 

"Little Pedlington," was the only novelist to whom, so 
far as I could see, Dickens owed any thing. Minto re- 
plied that he believed he could trace marks of Theodore 
Hook in Dickens. He spoke of the lines : 

" In Vienna's fatal walls 
God's finger touched him and he slept," 

in connection with the remark that the word " fatal " is 
incongruous with the sentiment that follows. He turned 
to his favorite theme, the young writers of the day. 
Most of them he met on his visits to London, and 
cheered them with his cordial praise. For Mr. Barrie, 
whom he first met under my roof, he had a warm 
admiration, but I think he expected most from Mr. 
Quiller-Couch. I sent him Mr. Couch's poems for 
review in The Bookman, and it was, I believe, the last 
book read to him. 

Minto's best work was done perhaps in literary history 
and criticism, and had he lived he would have given us 
a monumental book in this department. Nothing, how- 
ever, could have increased the estimate of his character 
formed by all who knew him. The man himself was 
greater than any book he could have written. 

Mr. P. W. Clayden, the editor of The Daily 
News, sends the following note of Minto's con- 
nection with that newspaper : 

I am a little surprised to find how short his connec- 
tion with us was. His first article appeared on the 14th 
of August, 1878. It was on Indian Finance. Here is 
the list of subjects on which he wrote in the first 
fortnight : 

August 14. Indian Finance. 

August 15. Cyprus. 

August 16. The Eastern Question. 

August 1*7. India. 



XXX BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

August 20. The Eastern Question. 
August 21. The Eastern Question. 
August 22. Batoura. 
August 23. The Eastern Question. 
August 24. The Government. 
August 24. Election News. 

He continued to write, chiefly on these subjects, till 
1880, and his last article in Tlie Daily News was on the 
20th of May, 1880. He also wrote some reviews, and 
occasional articles on literary subjects, as well as articles 
on the smaller topics which arise in the regular course 
of newspaper work. He acted during nearly the whole 
of this year and nine months as an assistant editor, 
attending at night twice a week on evenings on which 
I was absent, and being with me when I took the 
editorship in Mr. Hill's absence. My impression is that 
he never took quite kindly to the night-work. He was 
not a rapid writer, but his articles were distinguished 
for the fulness and accuracy of the knowledge they 
exhibited, and their forcible and clear argument. I 
always found him a most pleasant and trustworthy 
colleague. One result of that connection remains. We 
were wanting some one to write leaders on legal sub- 
jects, and Minto brought with him one day Mr. Herbert 
Paul, now M. P. for South Edinburgh. Mr. Paul 
showed great aptitude and capacity for the work, and 
has been more and more intimately associated with us 
ever since. During the time of Minto's connection with 
the paper I was busy at home in writing " England 
under Lord Beaconsfield," the notice of which in Tlie 
Daily Nevis was written by Minto. I find that my 
regular attendance at the office at night was then three 
times a week, Minto being there on the other three 
nights. On any pressure arising I went on extra nights, 
and it was only on such nights and at times when I was 
editing that I was at the office at night with him. 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION XXXI 

After he suddenly left in May, 1880, we expected that he 
would come back again, as he had done on a previous 
occasion, but he did not. His leaving was entirely his 
own doing, and we all much regretted it. He was living 
then very near to me, and the break at the office made 
no break in our friendship. He was at once engaged on 
Tlie Pall Mall Gazette, and I saw none the less of him. 
When he was sent to Aberdeen I greatly regretted his 
removal for my own sake, but rejoiced in it for him. 
He always came to see us down to the time of his last 
visit to London, and I always felt, to the end, that 
warm friendship for him which I had formed during the 
time we worked together at The Daily News. I do not 
think he was in his proper element in newspaper work. 
He was too fastidious as to style and treatment, — using 
the word fastidious in its best sense, — and was not 
entirely comfortable in the sort of rapid work which is 
required. His writing was perhaps a little too reflective 
for a daily paper — I mean that it necessarily took rather 
more time to produce than the more oratorical and dash- 
ing style of newspaper writing. It was the literary 
man, the scholar, the thinker, who was writing, rather 
than the busy politician. This literary character of his 
style was much valued. It is part of the tradition of 
The Daily Neios to cultivate that style. In his political 
views he was in hearty sympathy with the paper, though 
he always insisted on dealing with any topic on which 
he wrote in his own way, very often an original way. 

The Rev. William L. Davidson of Bourtie, whose 
acquaintance I had the pleasure of making at 
Minto's house, and whose contributions to philos- 
ophy and literature are well known, writes thus : 

It is not easy to convey a correct impression of Pro- 
fessor Minto to those who were not personally acquainted 
with him ; and those who were fortunate enough to 



XXX11 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

enjoy personal intercourse with him need no picture of 
mine. To me Minto was a very choice friend. Our mu- 
tual acquaintance dates from the time that I was assist- 
ant to Professor Bain in the English and Logic classes at 
the University of Aberdeen, and Minto was associated 
with Professor Bain also in various literary productions. 
Minto's first work — that on the English Prose Writers — 
was then in course of formation ; and I quite well 
remember the care and energy that he expended on that 
book, and his intense desire to render it worthy of the 
subject, and of the distinguished master under whose 
inspiration he wrote it. Meanwhile, although literature 
claimed his chief attention, politics had already begun 
to assert its hold over him. Even then he was pro- 
nounced in his opinions, — often dogmatic in asserting 
them in the presence of formidable opposition, — and fast 
acquiring a firm grasp of those principles that he was, 
by and by, to apply with vigor as editor of The Exami- 
ner. In University matters he took a keen interest ; 
and, though himself a graduate, was a moving spirit in 
the rectorial elections of those days. Socially, Minto 
was, at the date of which I speak, one of the most genial 
and pleasant of companions. He had then, and retained 
to the very close of his days, a bonhomie that was 
remarkable ; and his intense enjoyment of the society 
of kindred souls, together with his abundant wit and 
humor, made him a universal favorite. I could record 
scenes and incidents that took place in Aberdeen, either 
in his own lodgings or in mine, in which he was a con- 
spicuous figure, and which foreshadowed in no unam- 
biguous way the man as he was soon to become. In 
particular, I recollect a striking reading and analysis of 
part of one of Massinger's plays, in his own room, which 
clearly disclosed the able and sympathetic critic that 
his work on the English Poets, later on, proved him to 
be. But these are sweet memories of the past, which 
are best kept to one's self. 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION XXXU1 

For a number of years — indeed, during his whole stay- 
in London, while he was attached to literature and 
journalism there — Minto's path and mine lay apart. 
Intercourse, however, was heartily resumed when he 
returned to Aberdeen in 1880, as Professor of Logic and 
English, in succession to Dr. Bain, and continued to the 
end of his life. 

I can now speak of him from that date mainly in his 
professional and allied capacities. 

The first thing that struck one in Minto, in his capacity 
of professor, was his deep interest in his students. His 
first concern was that, both in the English and in the 
Logic class, each man should derive from the prelec- 
tions the highest possible benefit that he was capable of 
receiving. As a consequence he spared himself no 
pains in the preparation of his class lectures. Again 
and again have I found Minto, in his own house, busy 
over to-morrow's lecture — trying how best he could 
express, in vigorous phrase and with the apt illustra- 
tion that was always at his command, the point that 
was to him perfectly clear, but which, he suspected, 
might present difficulty to the student. Lucidity was, 
in his eyes, the supreme virtue. In this way he was 
ever ready to discuss with you obscure points in phi- 
losophy or in rhetoric, and to adopt whatever fresh light 
you might be able to throw upon the situation. He was 
particularly pleased if he could either find or have sug- 
gested to him some fresh historical aspect of the well- 
worn academic themes. Every year that passed found 
him deeper in his conviction of the power of the his- 
torical method in elucidating truth, and in bringing 
home its meaning to the learner. And this applied to 
his teaching of English as much as to his teaching of 
Psychology and Logic. I remember one day finding 
him in high spirits over the discovery he had just made 
that the best way to make plain to his class the mean- 
ing of humor was by inweaving the history of the 



XXxiv BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

word into his technical analysis, and accompanying with 
copious examples from literature. " Every man in his 
humor, you know," cried Minto, jubilant ; " it was his 
humor to wear a coat with lappets," and so on. Allied 
to this was his keen appreciation of luminous definitions 
of or subtle distinctions between synonymous terms. I 
cannot forget the pleasure with which he received a 
little bit of phrasing of my own which struck him as 
felicitous. I bad gone to Aberdeen to address the youth 
of the city on Dr. Murray's " New English Dictionary," 
and, while there, was Minto's guest. "What's your 
subject?" he asked on my arrival. I told him it was 
Dr. Murray's Dictionary, and that I had entitled the 
lecture " Romance in Words." " ' Romance in Words ' ! " 
he exclaimed, with a bright gleam of the eye, which 
never failed when his intellectual interest was awakened; 
" capital ! that is the only proper definition of a dic- 
tionary." The same appreciation of word-distinctions 
marked his writings, and is one of the elements that 
makes his style so admirable. 

A chief ground of Minto's great success as a teacher, 
and of his exceptional popularity with the students, lay 
in his juvenility of spirit and his boundless sympathy 
with youth. He was supremely fortunate in being able 
to put himself into the exact position of his audience, 
and thereby to carry them along with him. It is only 
another way of putting the same thing to say that, in 
teaching, he never forgot his own difficulties in student 
days in grappling with the subjects on hand ; and in 
setting himself with all his might to remove these he 
was adopting the best plan of removing the difficulties 
of his hearers also. 

Minto himself as a student, in his professorial days, is 
a theme that might well be elaborated. Vividly the 
picture rises of the Professor seated in his study, eagerly 
poring over some volume, or busily penning some dis- 
quisition, in full enjoyment of his pipe (for the harder he 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION XXXV 

worked the harder he smoked) ; and then the pause, 
the sparkle in the eye, and forthwith some subtile criti- 
cism, or some apt Chaucerian quotation, or some comic 
remark, as the case might be ; after that relevant talk 
or discussion ; and then resumption of the task. But 
Minto wrought too hard. Regardless of health, he sat, 
when not on college duty, almost day and night at his 
desk (for he burned the midnight oil far too profusely) for 
a number of years, with the briefest of holidays — elabo- 
rating theories, producing brilliant literary essays, dash- 
ing off critical reviews, writing novels, and shaping 
political speeches. Not even the strongest physical con- 
stitution could have stood it. But he laughed your 
warnings and advice to scorn, and waved you off with 
such a comic gesture that you almost forgave him, 
though you quite well saw that he was putting his 
resources to far too great a strain. 

As an examiner Minto was the embodiment of fair- 
ness. Scrupulous to a degree and painstaking, he never 
would allow partialities or personal predilections to 
weigh with him. This I can unreservedly testify, from 
ni}' long association with him as examiner in Philosophy 
and English. While wishful to act impartially, he was 
also desirous that the examinee himself should feel that 
strict justice was being done to him. Hence his uni- 
form readiness to go over their papers with students 
who had the misfortune to " go down " at an examina- 
tion, and to show them frankly where and why they 
had failed, and how they might make up in the future. 
Many an unfortunate had reason to thank him for this 
kindly office. 

As a host Minto excelled. To see him at his best 
you had to live with him under his own roof. Not only 
was his hospitality abundant, but his welcome was ever 
hearty and sincere. The stimulus, too, that you 
derived from discussion with him, and the enjoyment 
produced by his racy stories, his pleasantries and rep- 



XXXVI BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

artee, his sallies of genuine wit, were experiences never 
to be forgotten. Whether at the breakfast-table or at 
dinner, alike in the daytime and at the late hours of 
night, in his study, enveloped in a cloud of tobacco- 
smoke, Minto was always the same kind, bright, genial 
entertainer, rejoicing in you, and making you rejoice in 
him. 

The last time I saw Minto was in my own house. He 
came to jDay me a visit, of a few days' duration, in the 
middle of September, 1892. As there were two other 
distinguished thinkers living with me at the same time, 
congenial spirits, he was in his best form intellectually, 
and in the height of enjoyment, though, obviously, in 
very indifferent health. His enfeebled condition was to 
us a source of considerable anxiety ; but he himself 
made light of it — for he was always heroic. Into the 
amusements, as well as into the discussions, that went on 
he entered heartily, and with no lack of his wonted 
vivacity ; and it is a great satisfaction to me to know 
that he pronounced his last visit here to be one of the 
happiest moments of his life. Four months more and 
he was gone. The news of his death brought to friends 
everywhere the sense of an irreparable loss ; and learn- 
ing mourned the departure of one who had done noble 
service for letters, and would have done even greater 
things had longer life been given him. 

The following notes are from Mr. P. Chalmers 
Mitchell, a student of Professor Minto' s, and 
afterward his friend : 

In the year that Professor Minto received his appoint- 
ments as Professor I joined the University of Aberdeen 
as a first year's student. I saw him for the first time at 
his inaugural lecture in the English class, which was 
then held later in the day than the other classes attended 
by students of the first year. It is no disrespect to the 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION XXXV11 

memory of the occupant of the Latin chair, — the late 
Professor Black, — or to the present distinguished Princi- 
pal, who was then Professor of Greek, to say that I had 
left both their classes, unpersuaded, either by the bluff 
bonhomie of the one or by the urbane dignity of the 
other, into regarding Latin and Greek as any thing but 
routine tasks. I entered the English class singularly 
untouched by the glamour of learning, although in the 
pleasant consciousness that a university was vastly 
better than school, because its day was several hours 
shorter ; but in that English class-room I found a singu- 
larly pleasant man, not lecturing to a class, but sometimes 
sitting back in his chair, sometimes leaning over his desk, 
and talking to a student, perched as I was in a distant and 
disaffected back row, about things that were interesting. 
Beforehand I should have laughed at the suggestion 
that his subject-matter could be made interesting. He 
was talking about parsing, and analysis, and the deriva- 
tions of words. In the matter of parsing it was obvious 
that any fool could do it ; derivations of words one had 
hitherto got up from lists before prize examinations ; 
and in analysis a succession of masters had each had 
a separate whim in nomenclature. But in Professor 
Minto's hands the derivation of words was so treated 
that a Dictionary became a pageant of History, showing 
here the Crusaders dusty from the Holy Land, bringing 
with them some new idea, some strange animal or plant ; 
or there the prancing Normans introducing the graces 
of chivalry or the subtleties of law. The parsing of 
words was a tradition from the grammatical complexity 
of more primitive conditions of the language. The 
terminology of analysis was as you pleased ; the analysis 
itself was an anatomical display of the vital organs, by 
which a sentence should convey its meaning. I can see 
now that in this first lecture Professor Minto showed 
the leading feature of his teaching. The information 
he gave he did not offer for the direct acquisition of his 



XXXV1U BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION" 

pupils, as of intrinsic value. What was given was put 
before us as an illustration of the vast interest of the 
field of knowledge, waiting for any of us who cared to 
enter it. Incidentally we learned much, but chiefly we 
learned how and why we were, for ourselves, to learn 
more. In knowledge generally there were two special 
interests : the picturesque and human interest of how our 
language, and our Logic, came to be as they are ; and 
the practical interest — clearly separate from the other — 
of how best to use our language, or our reasoning, for 
the purposes of to-day. 

The bent of Professor Minto's teaching was specially 
marked in his lectures upon Logic. I do not think that 
the technical subtleties of Formal Logic had much 
attraction for him. Certainly he did not seek to stamp 
on the minds of his class the fantastic ingenuities of 
ancient and modern school-men. His lectures upon 
Formal Logic were lectures upon its evolution, and he 
sought to show us how each stage in the development 
of Deductive Logic was the abstract expression of an 
actual advance in man's power of reasoning ; and so we 
were spared the paradox which presents itself to the 
modern beginner in Deductive Logic. Although many 
processes of the " science of thought " seem but cum- 
brous methods of expressing the obvious, each method 
as unfolded by him had its explanation in the forgotten 
past. On the other hand, it was the practical use of 
Inductive Logic that Professor Minto chiefly insisted 
upon. In his exposition of this he followed with rare 
appreciative sympathy, considering the varied interests 
of his life, the progress of the natural and physical 
sciences. As these notes must, from their brevity, be 
discursive, let me say that afterward, when I knew him 
better, I was struck with his continued interest in sub- 
jects so remote from his own work as advances in Com- 
parative Anatomy and Embryology. While on a visit 
to me at Oxford, in the summer before he died, two of 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION XXXIX 

the things that interested him most were some new 
preparations of fossil skulls in the University Museum, 
and a technical discussion on Weismann's views on 
heredity. 

English Literature had so small a place in the cur- 
riculum for the degree of M. A. that Professor Minto 
could only give us twenty-five lectures on it. But in 
that brief space he so introduced us to the writers of 
our own tongue that their books became friends to us 
for life. In my own case, and in that of many others, 
I know that the most permanent impression we got at 
the University of Aberdeen was the love of English 
books, not for purjioses of future analytic study, but 
simply as our friends throughout life. Recently, when 
we were talking about the proposed institution of a final 
honors school of English Literature at Oxford, I told 
him of what I had got from his own short course in 
Aberdeen. He said in reply — what is specially worth 
remembering, now that so many schools of English 
Literature are practically accomplished facts : " I agree 
with those who think that English Literature might be 
made quite as severe an intellectual discipline as Greek 
or as Russian ; but the point most easily lost sight of, 
when it is turned into a discipline, is that it is the readiest 
friend and the greatest comfort to the many who get 
their discipline in other subjects. You can get intellec- 
tual discipline from any thing, but most people don't get 
much pleasure out of the things that were used to train 
their minds." 

Not only was Professor Minto constantly accessible, 
and most ready to help and advise his students in every 
way, but he kept up friendly relations with many of 
them, and he was interested in them all, in their subse- 
quent careers. The warm admiration I had for him 
while I was a student continued after I left the Uni- 
versity ; and I had the great good fortune to see him 
subsequently, on terms more intimate than are possible 



xl BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

between teacher and pupil. It is perhaps only given to 
poets adequately to memorialize their dead friends. 
Nature makes other mortals more reticent, though reti- 
cence may be selfish ; but I wish to say two things about 
Professor Minto. I wish to record the intense friendli- 
ness of his character. I do not only mean that he was 
the readiest of men to do good turns to others. All 
who knew him know that. But he had the rare virtue 
of seeing and believing only the best of other people. 
" What continually impresses me," he would say, " are 
what good fellows people are ! " I have known no 
instance like him of the " charity that thinketh no evil." 
It was really difficult for him to believe that any of his 
acquaintances would do a mean thing, or an ill-natured 
thing, purposely. Of one or two people who had 
obviously done him an ill turn I have heard him say : 
" Yes, I suppose he doesn't like me, but, you know, he is 
really a good fellow at heart ; " and then he would give 
some practical instance of conduct to his credit. 

The last thing I wish to set down is this : In no case, 
while I was a student, did I ever hear Professor Minto, 
in class or in private, touch upon any theological topic. 
Afterward, even in intimate talk, he rarely spoke of 
ultimate questions of metaphysic or belief. He had not 
the Scottish habit of strengthening his convictions by 
measuring them against those of others. But in my 
rooms at Oxford, the last evening he was with me, and 
the last time I saw him, he took a book from my shelves 
and said: "One person I have to make good — viz., my- 
self ; but my duty to my neighbor is much more nearly 
expressed by saying that I have to make him happy, if 
I may." 

Mr. John H. Lobban, who acted as Professor 
Minto' s assistant in his latest years at the Univer- 
sity, has sent me an appreciative estimate, which 
many Aberdeen students will be glad to read : 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xli 

In Mill's rectorial address to the students of St. 
Andrews there is a passage which might, with great fit- 
ness, be applied to Professor Minto's work at the Uni- 
versity of Aberdeen. " There is nothing," said Mill, 
" which spreads more contagiously from teacher to pupil 
than elevation of sentiment : often and often have 
students caught from the influence of a professor a con- 
tempt for mean and selfish objects, and a noble ambition 
to leave the world better than they found it, which they 
have carried with them throughout life." The tributes 
already paid by students are abundant evidence that 
Professor Minto exercised such an influence ; but few 
students could have been fully aware of the thorough- 
ness and scrupulous fairness with which he performed 
his duties as professor and examiner. 

These qualities his assistants had necessarily excellent 
opportunities of observing, and I recollect how forcibly I 
was impressed by them when I had first to examine 
university papers under his supervision. In the case of 
one examination, where the time for correction was so 
limited that he divided the papers with me, Professor 
Minto had arranged a scheme of marking with such 
precision that, after doing a number of papers together, 
the possibility of a discrepancy between our respective 
estimates was reduced to a minimum. It was only after 
having tested some of my results that he felt justified, 
in fairness to the students, in leaving a number of papers 
entirely in my hands. One other instance of the same 
desire for scrupulous fairness I may record. One of a 
number of essays that I had to value was so atrociously 
written and marred by emendations that, actuated, no 
doubt, by a not unnatural impatience, I had marked it 
rather hardly. Although one of more than a hundred 
essays, it did not pass the professor's eye ; for when 
soon after I went to discuss them with him, he asked 
me with characteristic humor and courtesy if I would 
allow him to read an essay to me. As read by him it 



xlii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

certainly was more than an average production, and as 
I saw the lesson he meant so courteously to convey, I 
owned my error and suggested a higher value, which 
he agreed to. He then laughingly told me that he had 
generally to impress his assistants with the moral that 
the matter of a student's paper should not be taxed for 
any blemish in its outward form. 

As a lecturer Professor Minto had a horror of " talk- 
ing at large." When using his lecture notes, I was 
struck with the endless ei-asures and corrections in the 
manuscript. This was due to his passionate desire for 
clear thinking and clear expression. He once told me 
that, whenever he noticed any general inability on the 
part of his class to follow him, he at once reconsidered 
the passage, and strove with all his powers of language 
to put it in a way that would admit of no dispute. 
This was the explanation of the countless erasures, the 
explanation, too, I imagine, of the unique way in which 
he could compel the unbroken interest of his students, 
no matter what the subject on hand. He desired, he 
told me, that his students should always get hold of 
something definite in every lecture, but few who reaped 
the advantage of that simplicity and clearness had any 
idea of the infinite pains and literary skill that produced 
them. 

Of the thoroughness that permeated all his work I 
may adduce one example that fell under my notice. 
About a month before the Christmas vacation he had 
to deliver a historical lecture to a country audience. 
As he was loaded with other work, and even at that 
time far from strong, I suggested that he might save 
himself so much research by using some of his plentiful 
old material, which, I argued, would have been quite as 
acceptable to his audience. He humorously rebuked me 
for my base advice, saying that he had "still some 
regard for his literary conscience," and that he had 
become so interested in his subject that he had ceased 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xliii 

to view it as a task. This I found to be no idle 
assertion, for in a conversation some days later, when 
talking over the subject of his lecture, he cited 
dates and quoted extensive passages from history 
with such absolute ease that I am convinced that, 
though as yet he had not put a word' on paper, I 
got the bulk of the lecture, delivered with as much 
accuracy and grace of expression as did the audience 
that heard it read. 

It is, however, of the period of his last illness that I 
can hope to add any thing of interest to what has been 
already said by others. It seemed to me characteristic 
of Professor Minto that, when he was suddenly prostrated 
and unable to conduct his two classes, he did not bid me, 
or even ask me, to fill the breach. When summoned by 
him to consider what was to be done in the emergency, 
he suggested his proposal with the utmost delicacy ; 
and it was only after I had expressed my willingness to 
try the work that he accepted as a favor what he would 
obviously have been justified in regarding as a privilege 
conferred. During the whole of his illness it is no 
hyperbole to say that he exhibited an extraordinary 
triumph of will. It was his express wish that he should 
know exactly what I lectured on from day to day, and, 
though racked with pain, he discussed the work of both 
classes with all his usual ardor. It was sometimes hard 
for me to realize the extent of his illness while he im- 
pressed upon me the important points of some devel- 
opment in literature which he desired me to emphasize. 
His rare powers of memory never failed him, and I 
recollect how, while propped up in bed, he would quote 
illustrations for the English lectures from Chaucer or 
Pope, unravel one of Marlowe's or Shakespeare's plots, 
or explain some far-fetched conceit in Donne. It seemed 
to me infinitely pathetic to hear him in broken words, 
but feigning something of that joyous ring of voice 
with which his students will always associate their 



xllV BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

memories of Chaucer, assuring me that John Donne 
deserved the epitaph : 

" Here lies a king that ruled, as he thought fit, 
The universal monarchy of wit." 

It was, however, on the occasion of his attempt to 
resume work for the second time that his mental hero- 
ism was most apparent. He told me repeatedly that 
he felt it to be his only chance of recovery, and that 
if he could not lecture he might surrender all hope. 
Doubtless this feeling was genuine, but I saw that he 
was prompted also by the desire to relieve myself of at 
least half the work. I was present in his anteroom 
when he literally staggered into the class-room to 
deliver his last lecture ; and I can conceive no greater 
effort of will than that which enabled him to triumph 
over his pain, and to deliver a brilliant lecture on the 
decline of the Elizabethan drama. 

Of the value of his own literary work he was ever 
dubious. On more than one occasion during his illness 
he spoke hesitatingly of what he had written as not 
"half good enough for publication," and the only time 
I remember him speaking with confidence of his unpub- 
lished work was, curiously enough, the last occasion on 
which he spoke to me of literary matters. Asking me 
whether I saw my way clear to the end of the session, he 
begged me to do all the justice I could to the lecture on 
Burns, repeating, with unusual emphasis, that his lecture 
on Burns, formerly delivered at Edinburgh, was "most 
distinctly the best thing " that he had ever written. 

It would be an injustice to Professor Minto's memory, 
and one specially unpardonable for me to commit, were 
I not to record the appreciation he had of the sympathy 
extended him by the students. It will always be a 
pleasure for the English and Logic students of 1892-93 
to know that Professor Minto repeatedly said that 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xlv 

nothing had ever touched him more deeply than the 
way in which the students had reciprocated the feelings 
he had always entertained for them. 

During the past eighteen years it has fallen to 
my lot to suggest many distinguished men for 
the St. Andrews honorary degree of Doctor of 
Laws ; but there is no one whom I ever proposed 
with greater satisfaction than Professor Minto. 

The spontaneous tributes borne to him after 
his death in the Aberdeen University Magazine, 
— Alma Mater, — alike by students and professors, 
were more significant of the work he did, and of 
the esteem in which he was held, than the 
tributes recorded of any other Scottish teacher 
at the close of this century. From Alma Mater 
of March 1, 1893, the following extracts may be 
made : 

The first notice in "In Memoriam " is entitled 
" Vale ! " In it the following occurs : 

The highest tribute we can pay to Professor Minto's 
memory is to say that he was the students' friend. 
With that disinterestedness and that perseverance 
which we must ever identify with his life, he has often 
pleaded our cause when we least knew it, and in his 
contact with the members of his own classes his genial 
manner, his winning expression of face, and above all 
his kindly word, stand out even more strongly than his 
more immediate teaching. If there was ever a man 
who touched the heart of studentdom, that man was 
William Minto. His life was a living emblem of the 
power of sympathy. He felt for us and with us, and, 
naturally enough, we came first to respect and then to 
love him. In the words of Alfred Tennyson, he was 



Xlvi BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

"most a man," and, while we reverenced his intellect 
and gloried in his fame, it was for his manliness, his 
human nature, that we loved him. " His students 
almost adored him," said a press writer, in commenting 
on his death, and there is no exaggeration in the state- 
ment. To the outside world he was known for the fame 
of his mental powers, to us rather for his unfailing 
courtesy of manner, his rare loveliness of spirit. It was 
no mere precept that he gave when he told us to do 
our best to leave one small corner of earth the better 
for our being in it, for was not this his own constant 
endeavor? Of his devotion to duty one can scarcely 
speak, for had it been less, we cannot but feel that he 
might have been with us to-day. When public spirit, 
kindliness of disposition, and intellectual force unite to 
make a man and a teacher who is brought into contact 
with those whose characters have in great measure to 
be formed, need we wonder that his removal should 
leave a gap which it seems well-nigh impossible to fill, 
and make the unspoken thought of every student in 
Aberdeen University to-day: "Without you, William 
Minto, our world seems lonesome " ? 

Mr. H. J. C. Grierson, Professor Minto' s suc- 
cessor in the Chair of English Literature, wrote : 

" Parmenides, my Master Parmenides ! " 

Professor Minto has passed away, and with him a 
gifted and inspiring teacher. Some who have spoken 
of him have done so from the position of those who 
knew his great predecessor, and could compare the two. 
We knew only the one, and found in him the one true 
teacher of our experience. 

Perhaps it is for this reason that we cannot draw the 
usual distinction between his teaching of literature and 
of philosophy. It may be that in the former he had 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xlvii 

done more original and valuable work, but it was in bis 
Logic class that, for my own part, I first felt bis full 
power as an instructor, and caugbt tbe spirit of bis 
metbod. Dr. W. L. Mackenzie bas said justly that that 
metbod was historic, but it was also dialectic in the 
Socratic sense of the word. He realized to no small 
extent that the truest function of the teacher was not 
to fill tbe mind with information from without, but to 
elicit its own latent thoughts and faculties and inter- 
ests. I have had occasion to compare bis method with 
that of other lecturers in Logic, and it has deepened my 
sense of its value. He began with no abstract defini- 
tions, and he uttered no dogmatic statements, but he 
led us easily, and acquiescing with him at each step, 
from the simplest facts of our every-day consciousness to 
a realization of the great problems of truth and reality. 

In fact, the spirit of Professor Minto's philosophic 
teaching and literary criticism recalls the spirit of the 
greatest of teachers and critics, the Socrates that we 
know in Plato. It pursued tbe same enquiring metbod, 
it subjected to the same searching criticism all tradi- 
tional dogmas, it glowed with the same enthusiasm for 
truth, and the best expression of truth. 

Nor in other respects was be unlike that great teacher. 
Like him he loved young men, and met them with 
openness and freedom from all assertions of superiority. 
When but Bajans we were " gentlemen " to him, with 
opinions of our own, and minds to be appealed to ; and 
when we came to know him personally, we found the 
same openness, and a close personal interest in our lives 
and futures. He discussed with us ; he planned with 
us ; he laughed with us — and we loved him ; but now, 
like Socrates, he is taken from us when our esteem and 
affection wei*e still growing, and we know not when 
we shall behold him again. " The hour of departure is 
come : we go our ways — I to die, you to live ; but 
whose lot is happier is hidden from all save God." 



xlviii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

The following recollections are by his colleague 
Professor W. M. Ramsay : 

It is not an easy task that the editors of Alma Mater 
have proposed to me ; but I will try, at their request, 
to perform it, however inadequately and imperfectly. 
To describe on the moment a character so marked, so 
powerful, so self-contained and complete, so indepen- 
dent and individual, so true to his friends, so difficult for 
his enemies, is beyond my poor powers. I can only try 
to relate what I actually saw of William Minto, and the 
impression he made on me in old times, and this may 
perhaps help to give some shadow of his personality. At 
this moment I should like, as far as possible, to avoid 
any thing that should rouse any feeling except sym- 
pathy. 

When I entered College, Minto was Assistant Professor 
of Natural Philosophy, and it is a curious proof of the 
ignorance of University business and University life that 
used to characterize some Bajans that I never, during 
that winter, heard a word about the great controversy 
in which he was involved. It was not till years had 
passed that I came to know what had occurred. After 
more than twenty years had passed I found out the 
facts by consulting the files of the Aberdeen papers ; 
and then I learned for the first time how splendidly the 
late Principal Pirie had advocated his cause in the Court. 
My ignorance at the time will therefore serve as an 
excuse for passing over the subject ; but no one could 
refrain from alluding to the moral triumph which he 
gained in the long-run over those who had defeated 
him — so far as worldly appearance went — at the time. 
Few men in my time have had such a hard trial as he 
had when, at the conclusion of a most brilliant Univer- 
sity career, crowned with a Ferguson Scholarship, his 
alma mater closed her gates against him for an action 
which at the present time would be applauded and 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xlix 

approved by all. We should now look on it as a proof 
of innate delicacy and gentlemanly spirit, if there could 
possibly arise an occasion to provoke it — which, with 
the tone that now rules in university life, is, I believe, 
impossible. In truth, there has been a great improve- 
ment in the standard of public feeling within the last 
twenty -five years, and I hope we should now make better 
use of his genius than of old. 

It was not till the end of my fourth year at College 
that I first knew Minto, and our acquaintance began in 
connection with the recently founded Literary Society, to 
which, after a time, I had the honor of proposing that 
he should be admitted as an honorary member. His 
name was already familiar to me, for in the course of 
my third year he had matriculated as a student, and had 
taken an active part in the re-election of Sir M. E. Grant 
Duff as Lord Rector. I was sometimes quoted as a sad 
example of the students whom he had perverted to vote 
against the cause of Classics ; but, in reality, I never to 
my knowledge saw him during that year, much less 
listened to his alluring speeches in public or in private. 
" Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear " impelled me 
even then, when I had only vague blind yearnings after 
ancient literature, to vote as I have always done against 
the misdirection of classical studies, debasing them to 
be fetters, instead of wings, for the free modern spirit. 
It was our common study of modern literature that first 
brought us together as lovers of the "romantic " side in 
that literature, as believers that the aim and crown of 
all literary education is to understand and appreciate the 
spirit of our own age. We approached literature from 
quite opposite sides, and we differed widely on many 
points of thought and life, — not points of mere detail, 
but ideas which we believed with our whole heart to be 
of infinite importance, and on behalf of which he at 
least was ready to die, — yet our differences of view never 
interfered with our friendship ; and when we met, after 



1 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

years of separation, the old feelings remained as strong 
as ever. 

Very soon after he joined the Literary Society, we 
elected him to the office of President, which fell vacant 
opportunely ; and there can be no doubt that the success 
of the young society was greatly due to the skill and 
knowledge which he brought to our aid. 

After seeing a great deal of him in 1871 I lost sight 
of him for years, till we met accidentally on a London 
steam-boat pier in 1879 ; and we continued to meet dur- 
ing my occasional visits to London, until I disappeared 
into the wilds of Asiatic Turkey in the spring of 1880. 
Before I went out he offered to do his best to procure 
the acceptance of letters from Turkey by the great 
London morning paper with which he was at the time 
connected. I fully intended to avail myself of his 
advocacy, but time was too short and life too busy for 
letter-writing, and only one or two brief notes passed 
between us, until the spring of 1886, when I received a 
letter from him telling that the Humanity Chair here 
would shortly be vacant, and advising me to be a candi- 
date. I am glad now to say publicty, as I have often 
said to him, that I owe my appointment to this letter, 
and to the timely information which it gave me. But 
for his letter I should have been ignorant, till it was too 
late, about the impending vacancy, and about various 
other facts which it was essential to know. 

In the abundant opportunities I have since then had 
of observing Minto the quality that most struck me was 
his thoroughness. Every thing I have ever seen him do 
was done with the same devotion : he brought his whole 
powers of mind, and often (as I saw with alarm) his 
whole powers of body, to the work. The minute esti- 
mate of the capacities and faults of all his students which 
I have seen noted down in his books — apparently as a 
regular practice — astonished me ; they resembled the 
sketches which professional readers of character are 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION H 

ready to supply to customers. He did not merely esti- 
mate numerically the value of each examination paper, 
he also estimated it qualitatively as an index of the 
candidate's moral and intellectual character. 

That he persistently overworked himself I often 
observed, and often remonstrated with him about it — 
always to be met with the laughing reply that I was 
myself a worse instance of the fault. The chill which 
brought on the last illness was, I think, attributed by 
him to a game at curling during the Christmas vaca- 
tion ; but it seemed to me that quite as great mischief 
was done in December at a meeting of Faculty in the 
icy Senatus-room, where he sat for more than two hours 
at the head of the table, till he was obviously chilled to 
the marrow. When the meeting was over, he came to 
the fire, saying : " I might as well go to nry grave as 
do this sort of thing again." I have often pitied the 
wretched candidates for Honors and Scholarships, who 
are compelled to shiver for three hours at a time in that 
room, which is generally as cold as a Roman Church on 
the Aventine in winter. By the time a few more have 
suffered from it a new Senatus-room may be ready in 
Marischal College. 

There is one quality which beyond all others rouses 
my admiration, and that quality Minto had in a remark- 
able degree — I mean courage. I can worship even mere 
physical courage, which it is nowadays the fashion to 
despise (especially among those who have never needed 
or seen or felt it) ; but the splendid moral courage which 
he showed seems to me almost the greatest quality in 
human nature. He never flinched a hair's-breadth from 
the opinion he believed in, however unpopular, or even 
dangerous, it might be : he always supported a friend if 
the world was against him. 

As a critic and scholar he was only coming to full 
consciousness of his powers and freedom in using them ; 
and there is good reason to think that the future work 



lii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

which (had fate been kinder to us) he would have done 
as the first Professor of English in this University 
would have been his best work, and, I think, would have 
taken permanent rank among the finest in its kind. His 
genius matured slowly, partly from its natural character, 
partly from the distractions and variations of occupa- 
tion in which his life had been spent. Truly, I think 
the University might have gained by wise treatment 
much more from him than it did. 

The Faculty of Arts has lost him who was not merely 
the titular head, but also by a combination of fine quali- 
ties the mainstay of its reputation, both in Aberdeen 
and before the world. The University has lost its 
clearest headed and ablest administrator : in every ques- 
tion that emerged he recognized at a glance what was 
the solution, and urged it with unhesitating energy. 
His quick insight was due to the fact that he never was 
governed by a calculation of selfish or narrow advan- 
tages : in every case he judged upon the same general 
principles. He lived and fought for an ideal of freedom 
and honesty, in the ultimate triumph of which he had 
the most unfaltering confidence. In this lay his strength, 
and the secret of his perfect frankness and freedom 
from affectation. He worked, not for himself, not even 
for his family, but for his cause. He had nothing to 
conceal, but rather gloried in openly stating his real 
aims ; and many believe, as I do, that, had not his 
policy been so often thwarted, our University would 
be to-day far stronger than it is. 

In The Bookman of April, 1893, Mr. A. T. 
Quiller-Couch wrote : 

Were I to confess how seldom we met and how slight 
was our correspondence, your readers would think it 
highly presumptuous of me to write about Professor 
Minto, and that to call him a friend was almost inde- 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION liii 

cent. Yet on one point, at any rate, they would be 
wrong. It is a fact that we never wrote a line to each 
other ; yet from time to time, and by every common 
friend, he sent messages that were valuable beyond tell- 
ing to a young man just beginning to write. But 
Minto's sympathies were always with the young ; and, 
indeed, on the first occasion that we met this was rather 
trying. In my father's house the talk might run on 
statesmen, divines, or men of science ; but men of let- 
ters were the great men. Other callings were well 
enough, but writers were a class apart, and to belong to 
it was the choicest of ambitions. I had grown up in 
this habit of mind, and have not yet entirely outgrown 
it ; so that the prospect of seeing Minto and listening 
to him fluttered me, as no doubt it flutters a young 
curate to dine with his bishop. He would not let me 
worship, however ; would not even let me listen ; but 
seemed only anxious to hear about my own endeavors 
and prospects. I think this forgetfulness of self was 
native in him and incurable. Certainly, though I 
admired him as much as ever, he had won a very much 
warmer feeling in the inside of half an hour ; and from 
that time was constantly adding to the load of kindness 
which now can only be repaid by mourning his loss, and 
remembering his wise counsel and encouragement. No 
other critic has given me the tithe of that counsel or a 
hundredth part of that encouragement. And when I 
say that all this was bestowed at every opportunity 
from the date of our first and only intimate conversa- 
tion to the time of his death, that even on his death- 
bed he tried to do me a last service in the old fashion, 
it will be allowed that my burden of obligation is heavy 
indeed. 

I cannot believe that the newspapers and reviews 
have done justice to his memory. They praise him as a 
good man and a sincere lover of letters ; but the quality 
of his work, and especially of his critical work, has 



liv BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

received too little attention. For it was of the rarest. 
Whatever his subject, Minto seemed to approach it 
with a mind absolutely clear of prejudice ; to take it 
up with the single desire of exploring it in his reader's 
company, and to handle it with a modest self-effacement 
that may explain the slightly neglectful attitude of a 
generation eager to be obtruded on by " striking per- 
sonalities." In the same way, though he was one of 
the few men left who could construct a long English 
sentence, and fit it with well-proportioned members, 
and make it walk upon legs, his style was so temperate 
and business-like, so admirable as a means to an end, 
and so naked of ornamentation, that it too often passed 
unnoticed. We must be " striking " in these times, or 
we are naught ; but this writer learned to use his theme 
as a stalking-horse for his own wit. He had an insatiable 
interest in literature ; but this interest was scientific as 
well as sympathetic ; and he handled criticism scientifi- 
cally. On the whole, his method was that of Sainte- 
Beuve, and, though there are many more showy, a better 
has yet to be invented. The others may please for a 
while ; but in the end we shall sigh for temperance, 
modesty, restraint, the virtues that are above fashion, 
and never, never tire ; and where temperance, modesty, 
and restraint are valued, we may be confident that Minto 
will not be forgotten. In a series to which all the best 
critics of his generation contributed, his monograph on 
Defoe stands out as a bright example of the way in 
which criticism should be written ; and its excellence 
in comparison with the majority grows clearer as time 
goes on — a sure test. But whether in his writings or 
his life, Minto was a man in whose company it was 
good to be, and to remain. 

The following appeared in The Westminster 
Gazette of March 2 : 



BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION lv 

QUHAT SAY THEY ? 

IN MEMORIAM WILLIAM MINTO. OBIIT MARCH I. 

It was his constant care to make his subject, whether literature 
or the high and dry sands of metaphysics, as far as possible, 
a mirror of the life we live. 

The hand that led our pilgrim bands 

These by-gone years 
To England's wondrous lettered lands, 

Its kings and seers, 
No more shall smooth the rugged way — 
'Tis cold this day. 

In misty metaphysic maze 

He shed a light, 
That cleared away the hanging haze 

And darkening night. 
But ne'er again shall he we weep 
Our footsteps keep. 

Was it with Chaucer's dukes and dames, 

Or saintly Bede ? 
Was it with Hamiltonian aims, 

Or rigid Reid ? 
The by-gone age was lit with life, 
Its flux and strife. 

And still, he brought our restless times 

Within his ken — 
A Barrie or a Kipling's rhymes 

Would charm his pen. 
The dainty genius of a " Q" 
Was brought to view. 

Then oft indeed a budding bard, 

As yet unknown, 
Who found the way to glory hard, 

He'd gladly own ; 
The future way to fame was cleared, 
The tyro cheered. 



lvi BIOGEAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

The ravelled skein of logic-lore 

We saw unwound. 
The trials of the path no more 

The journey bound. 
Ah, who again shall lift the thorn 
As him we mourn ! 

Can we, to-day immersed in gloom, 

This guide forget, 
Although by very Crack of Doom 

We seem beset — 
A halting tribute this, that sings 
Our king at King's. 

In the same paper, The Westminster Gazette, 
of March 11, Minto's friend, Mr. Kichard Le 
Gallienne, writes as follows : 

PROFESSOR MINTO. 

Nature, that makes Professors all day long, 
And, filling idle souls with idle song, 
Turns out small Poets every other minute, 
Made earth for men, but seldom puts men in it. 

Ah ! Minto, thou of that minority 
Wert man of men, we had deep need of thee ! 
Had Heaven a deeper ? Did the heavenly Chair 
Of earthly Love wait empty for thee there ? 

I may perhaps be allowed to repeat, at the 
close of this introductory and biographic sketch, 
that there is ample and most valuable material 
for a sequel volume of Minto's work, including 
his numerous " Encyclopaedia Britannica" arti- 
cles, his papers on John Donne, Wordsworth, 
and Matthew Arnold, as well as those delight- 
ful lectures which he gave to literary and other 

Societies in Scotland. 

William Knight. 

St. Andrews, June, 1894. 



THE LITERATURE 

OP 

THE GEORGIAN ERA 



CHAPTER I 

THE POSITION OF MEN OF LETTERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH 
CENTURY 

DECLINE OF ROYAL PATRONAGE — WHY IS THE GEORGIAN ERA 
A DISTINCT LITERARY PERIOD ? — CONDITION OF POETRY DUR- 
ING THE CENTURY, AND VIEWS OF ITS CRITICS AS TO THE 
MEANING OF NATURE 

The combined reigns of the four Georges may pos- 
sibly he thought an arbitrary and artificial section of 
literary history to choose as a subject for a course of 
lectures. What had the four Georges to do with 
literature ? is a question that naturally occurs when 
they are proposed as the figure-heads of a literary 
period ; and the answer must be that they had little 
or nothing to do with literature beyond occasionally 
furnishing in their illustrious persons fairly good 
themes for the humorist and the satirist. If you read 
Thackeray on the four Georges, you will see that these 
reigns supplied ample materials both for the laughing 
philosopher and the weeping philosopher. But neither 
of the first two Georges cared for literature, or did any 
thing directly to encourage literature, and it was per- 
haps as well that they let it alone. Matters mended 
a little under the second two. George IV. had an 
interview with Dr. Johnson, the record of which is one 



2 MEN OF LETTERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

of the best known passages in Boswell's " Life." But 
this was after Dr. Johnson's fame was fully established. 
The most conspicuous instance of royal patronage of 
literature in these reigns — patronage that really helped 
a rising man — occurred in the first year of this century, 
when the Prince who afterward became George IV. 
put down his name among the subscribers to Thomas 
Moore's translation of Anacreon, and admitted the 
youthful poet to the honor of personal acquaintance. 
Moore was overjoyed at this piece of good fortune ; 
and well he might be, for it greatly helped him in his 
career of fashionable popularity. In a sense it may be 
said that literature owes the anacreontic lays of Tom 
Little to royal favor ; and this is its only obligation to 
the favor of the four Georges — an obligation that can- 
not be thought of with altogether unmingled gratitude. 
The Georges did little or nothing for literature. But, 
though it looks like a paradox, this fact, so far from 
being a reason against choosing their reigns as a liter- 
ary period, is one of the reasons why the accession of 
the dynasty constitutes a material point of departure 
for a historical survey. There is a certain interest in 
seeing how literature prospered when it was no longer 
sunned by the royal countenance, and what new 
influences came in to compensate the loss. Up to the 
time of the first George every eminent man of letters had 
received direct encouragement from the Court. In the 
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries literature was almost 
entirely dependent on royal favor, and there was 
always some member of the royal family who took a 
warm interest in letters. In the time of Edward III. 
Chaucer was patronized by John of Gaunt, taken into 
the royal household, and rewarded with lucrative public 
appointments. Gower undertook his most celebrated 
poem at the personal request of Richard II. One of 
the first cares of Henry IV. when lie usurped the 
Crown was to remember and provide for the wants of 



COURT INFLUENCE UPON LITERATURE 3 

his father's old favorite, the poet of the "Canterbury 
Tales." The ladies of this royal house connected their 
memories with all that was best in the literature of the 
time. Lady Jane Beaufort, granddaughter of John of 
Gaunt, inspired the author of the "King's Quhair." 
Her niece, the Countess of Pembroke, mother of 
Henry VII., was the principal promoter of learning 
in her generation. Margaret, the sister of Edwai'd IV., 
who married the Duke of Burgundy, encouraged Cax- 
ton in the literary enterprise which led to the intro- 
duction of printing into England. Another Margaret, 
daughter of Henry VII., by her marriage with James 
IV. of Scotland gave a new tone to the poetry of the 
Scottish Court. I need not give examples of the 
influence of the Court in literature during the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries. The circle of education 
began to widen very rapidly after the introduction of 
the printing-press, and the creative faculty was brought 
within the reach of many and diverse incitements to 
produce ; capitalists pressed forward eager to divine 
and satisfy the new demands ; but among the diverse 
influences on literary production one was always con- 
spicuous, the influence of the Court. Even when, as in 
the case of the great Shakespearian dramatic literature, 
writers did not receive their first impulse from the Court, 
the Court hastened to put the seal of its approbation 
on the new product. It was an entirely novel and 
unprecedented situation when the throne was filled by 
a king who could hardly speak a word of English, and 
who was entirely destitute of interest in English or any 
other literature ; and it cannot but be interesting to 
examine what effect, if any, this circumstance had on 
literary production. At an earlier stage of literary 
history, in an earlier state of civilization, the with- 
drawal of royal patronage would have been like 
the withdrawal of the sun from the solar system. Did 
it produce any perceptible effect on the literature of 



4 MEN OF LETTERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

the eighteenth century? It did not ; the centre of 
literary life and heat had shifted ; where, then, are we 
to look for this centre ? 

The mere fact that the personal tastes of the king and 
his intimate circle ceased to have any directing influ- 
ence on literature would alone make the Hanoverian 
accession a notable literary epoch. But this event 
affected literature much more profoundly in another 
way — namely, by putting an end to a long period of 
political uncertainty. The settlement of the long-vexed 
question of the succession to the Crown made a change 
in the position of the man of letters that can only 
be described as a revolution. A long explanation is 
required to enable you to understand the full signifi- 
cance of this change, unless you happen to be versed 
in the history of the period. First, you must take 
notice of the means by which public opinion in those 
days was appealed to. There was no reporting of 
political speeches ; there were no daily newspapers with 
leading articles ; every thing was done by means of 
occasional pamphlets in prose or verse. Nowadays, if 
you wish to know the minds of the leaders of opinion 
you read the magazines and the leading articles in the 
newspapers. But in the time of Queen Anne, and for 
half a century before, the work of expressing and en- 
lightening opinion was carried on by means of pamph- 
lets. Whenever the public mind was excited on any 
question, — a war, or a parliamentary election, or a great 
commercial enterprise, or a disastrous calamity, — swarms 
of such pamphlets poured from the press ; and if the 
public excitement ran high and the pamphlet was 
effectively written, it was sold in the shops and hawked 
about the streets in thousands. Next, you must take 
notice of the character of the great political question 
of the time — the succession to the kingdom. From 
the Revolution of 1688 to the accession of George I. 
the succession was uncertain. The nation was divided 



COURT INFLUENCE UPON LITERATURE 5 

into two great parties of Whig and Tory, the one eager 
to keep out, the other to bring back, the exiled family 
of Stewarts. Cart-loads of pamphlets were written 
to work on the public mind for the one purpose or the 
other. It is difficult for us in these days to understand 
the intense, absorbing, passionate character of the 
political struggles that went on while the succession 
lay in dispute and uncertainty. A few years ago there 
was not a little excitement in this country over the 
Eastern Question. There were public meetings and 
speeches and articles without end ; sides were taken 
with considerable earnestness and warmth. But the 
heat of a struggle is always in proportion to the impor- 
tance for the combatants of the issue at stake ; and no 
issue raised then could come home to the electors with 
one-tenth of the force of the momentous question, who 
should be the king of the country. The power of the 
Crown was great in those days ; and the leaders in the 
dispute about the succession fought with the fierce 
earnestness of men whose whole fortunes are bound 
up with the issue. Their properties, and even their 
lives, were at stake as well as their political power. If 
they took an active part on one side or the other, 
degradation, impoverishment, exile, even death, might 
follow upon failure. Triumph meant honors, wealth, 
and power ; defeat might mean forfeiture of their 
estates and banishment. Such were the high stakes for 
which the leaders were playing ; and for the common 
people also the political struggle was intensely exciting. 
It was in great part a religious question with them; 
encouragement, toleration, persecution, awaited their 
doctrines and forms of worship according as a Protes- 
tant or a Papist filled the throne ; and their feelings 
were thus profoundly interested. No such issues hang 
upon political struggles now, and the passion of the con- 
flict, however earnest and determined, can never reach 
the same pitch of absorbing intensity. 



6 MEN OF LETTERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

Tins, then, being the state of things, the leading com- 
batants deeply in earnest, the public mind quick and 
susceptible, every incident closely watched and sharply 
taken advantage of, and pamphlets the recognized means 
of working on public opinion, what was the effect on 
literature ? The political situation had a direct and 
immediate effect on the position of men of letters. The 
man who could write pamphlets, whether in prose or in 
verse, at once became a person of importance. Men of 
letters were sought after, caressed, rewarded, — we must 
not say bribed, — as they had never been before by am- 
bitious politicians and grasping Ministers. Versifiers 
were in especial demand, and, of course, the patrons 
were met half-way. Young gentlemen at the Universi- 
ties, with an elegant knack of versification, celebrated 
birthdays and battles, and even party triumphs in Parlia- 
ment, and sent their effusions to the powerful, in the 
hope of being rewarded by solid appointments in the 
public service, of course irrespective of special fitness. 
The splendid successes of a few helped to crowd this 
avenue to fame and fortune. You all know the story 
of Addison and his poem on the battle of Blenheim ; 
how the Lord Treasurer Godolphin complained to Lord 
Halifax of the poor quality of the poems generally 
written on such occasions, how Halifax said that he 
knew of a young poet who could do better, how a noble- 
man was sent to Addison's garret in the Haymarket to 
solicit his services, and how munificently the poet was 
recompensed with public appointments. This story is 
familiar, but it is only the most striking one of scores 
of a similar kind in Johnson's Lives of the Poets of that 
time. Addison himself, earlier in his career, when he was 
fresh from the University, was rewarded with a pension 
of three hundred pounds for a poem on the Peace of Rys- 
wick. Lord Halifax, the patron who helped him to the 
favor of the Crown, himself owed his first advancement 
to literature. When plain Charles Montagu, he had co- 



LITERATURE LIBERALLY REWARDED V 

operated with Prior in writing the political satire of 
"The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse." He was 
afterward introduced to King William with the words : 
" Sir, I have brought a mouse to wait on your Majesty." 
" You do well to put me in the way of making a man 
of him," the king is said to have replied, and forthwith 
ordered him a pension of five hundred pounds. Montagu's 
collaborator, Prior, was made secretary to an embass}* - . 
The political hits in his tragedy of " Tamerlane " obtained 
for Rowe an under-secretaryship in the Treasury ; Hughes 
obtained a place in the office of Ordnance for an ode on 
the Peace of Ryswick ; Dr. Blackmore's indirect compli- 
ments to the king in his " Prince Arthur " procured 
him a knighthood and the post of royal physician. 
And so on and so on throughout the reigns of William 
and Anne. Places of all kinds in the gift of the 
Ministers of the Crown were freely distributed among 
men of letters, without the slightest regard to any 
qualification except their power of making men and 
measures popular by direct and indirect panegyric. 

The effect of this extensive patronage on the character 
of Queen Anne poetry, on the poetry as poetry, we shall 
try to trace afterward ; meantime, I wish to make clear 
the position of men of letters before the accession of 
George I., and how completely this position was changed 
by the settlement of the disputed succession. Observe 
that the patronage of literature was not disinterested. 
The great office of the best literature is to elevate, 
strengthen, gladden, and purify human life, to expand 
the soul, to quicken the fancy, to enlarge the under- 
standing, to lift the mind out of the narrow round of 
personal concerns and enable it to command a wider 
horizon. It was not to enable men of letters to fulfil 
this mission that the Ministers of King William and of 
Queen Anne lavished places and pensions on them. It 
was purely as party writers that they were patronized, 
as brilliant political pamphleteers, useful rhetorical 



8 MEN OP LETTERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

panegyrists and biting satirists ; and when the need for 
their services passed away, the fountains of patronage 
were dried up. Very soon after George's accession it 
was apparent that the golden age was at an end. The 
batch of Whig poets who had remained faithful during 
the Tory Ministry of Queen Anne's last four years, — 
Addison, Steele, Rowe, Tate, Tickell, and other minor 
celebrities, — were munificently provided for in the first 
blush of the Whig triumph, but this was practically the 
last of the system. When Sir Robert Walpole got the 
reins of power firmly in his hands, and settled down 
into his policy of establishing the dynasty by peaceful 
measures, he saw that the poets, powerful enough agents 
in a time of warlike excitement, could be of little service 
to him, and he turned the golden stream from the Royal 
Treasury in another direction. Another circumstance 
helped to destroy the influence of the brilliant occasional 
writer, the rapid development of the periodical press, of 
newspapers and political journals. This was almost 
coincident with the accession of George I. There had 
been newspapers in the land from the time of the great 
Civil War, and regular political periodicals were estab- 
lished in the reign of Queen Anne, the first being 
Defoe's celebrated Review; but the chronicling of 
news and the expression of opinion were distinct func- 
tions, left to different organs. Such sheets as the 
Flying Post and the Mercury gave nothing but news ; 
the Tatler and the Spectator were confined to social 
essays ; the Examiner and the Whig Examiner, Mer- 
cator and the British Merchant, were purely political 
journals. The newspapers strictly so-called were not 
impartial ; they were in the pay of different parties, 
and their intelligence was garbled in different interests ; 
but they expressed no opinions, and it was only by the 
manipulation of news that they sought to influence the 
opinions of their readers. The " leading article," or 
" letter introductory," as it was at first called, — a pref- 



VENALITY OF NEWSPAPERS AND JOURNALISTS 9 

atory dissertation intended to lead the readers to cer- 
tain conclusions, — was the invention of the acute genius 
of Defoe early in the reign of George I. From that 
time various news-journals began to retain a letter-writer, 
as the writer of leading articles was then called, and 
journalism became a distinct occupation. Much of the 
public money that had gone in the reign of Queen 
Anne to the occasional pamphleteer now found its way 
to the pockets of the professional journalist. It was a 
corrupt time, measured by our modern ideas of literary 
independence. Walpole, a hard, unsentimental man of 
business, who believed in paying for services directly in 
solid cash, is said to have paid £50,000 in ten years to 
the literary supporters of his administration ; and one 
of them, Arnall, a journalist whose name you will find in 
no history of literature, boasted that he had received in 
three years no less a sum than £10,997, 6s. 8d. When 
we compare Walpole's system of securing literary sup- 
port for his measures with that prevalent in the time 
of Queen Anne, we are compelled to admit that the 
great political patrons of the earlier period, Somers and 
Halifax, and Oxford and Bolingbi'oke, did have some 
respect for literature as literature, and took a certain 
pride in playing the role of Maecenas, altogether apart 
from their sense of the political advantages of having 
men of letters on their side. 

The great change effected in the position of men of 
letters at the accession of George I. is, then, a solid 
reason for beginning a literary survey from that date. 
But the reign of the four Georges really owes its com- 
pleteness as a literary period to an accident. It so hap- 
pened that Pope's masterpiece, the " Rape of the Lock," 
was published in its complete form in the first year of 
the first George ; while the last year of the last George 
witnessed the publication of his first volume of poems 
by our late Poet-Laureate, Lord Tennyson. We thus 
find at the beginning of our period the leader of one 



10 MEN OP LETTERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

great school of poetry in the full blaze of his reputation ; 
and at the end the dawn of another great luminary and 
the foundation of a new school. What had poetry 
gained in the interval — an interval containing' the 
splendid poetic achievements of the first quarter of the 
nineteenth century, with the great names of Words- 
worth and Coleridge, and Scott and Byron, and Keats 
and Shelley ? At first sight it might seem as if there 
had been only a full circle revolution of a fixed wheel, 
an oscillation of a pendulum to and fro — as if poetry had 
only moved from the elaborate artistic care of Pope to 
the freedom and spontaneity of Wordsworth and Byron, 
and back to the elaborate art of Tennyson. But there 
was a real progression. Tennyson embodies new poetic 
ideals in his art, and these ideals were conceived and 
shaped in the interval between him and Pope. The age 
of Wordsworth and Byron was not only a season of 
great creative energy, but also a season of vivid and 
searching criticism. Not only were new masterpieces 
produced, but new life was given to the discussion of 
the first principles of the art of Poetry. And not only 
were the technicalities of poetry discussed — publicly 
discussed — by some of the leading masters in the art, 
the principles of diction, metre, imagery, and general 
construction, as had been done by hundreds of writers 
on the art of Poetry from Aristotle and Horace down 
to the Duke of Buckingham and Mr. Hayley, but new 
topics were introduced, and chief among them the nature 
of the poetic faculty, and the principles on which rank 
should be assigned to poets in their various degrees as 
spiritual benefactors of mankind. Wordsworth led the 
way both in creation and in criticism. Wordsworth was 
by no means the most popular poet in his generation, 
he had by no means the most powerful influence on the 
public, but he had unquestionably of all men in his 
generation the greatest influence on men of letters, on 
the producers of poetiy. It is, to use the language of 



macaulay's criticism of pope 11 

political economy, among the manufacturers and not 
the consumers of poetry that his influence is to be traced, 
and upon them it was enormous. For us, as students 
of poetry, the most significant and instructive fact in 
the reign of the four Georges is the gradual rise of the 
reputation of Wordsworth, and the gradual fall of the 
reputation of Pope. About the close of the reign of 
George IV. the reputation of Wordsworth had reached 
its zenith ; the reputation of Pope, supreme and 
unchallenged throughout the eighteenth century, had 
fallen to its nadir. We may fairly take Macaulay's 
essay on Byron, published in 1831, as marking the tri- 
umph of the Wordsworthian school. This essay, written 
with all the energy of Macaulay's brilliant rhetoric, laid 
hold of what had before been little more than an esoteric 
doctrine, and spread it far and wide over the public mind. 
Macaulay danced a sort of breakdown over the prostrate 
body of the great poet of the eighteenth century. He 
concentrated and emphasized all that had been said in 
disparagement of Pope. Pope had no imagination in 
the highest sense ; he had no correctness in the highest 
sense ; he was a painstaking slave to artificial rules ; his 
poetry was like a trimly kept garden, with smooth- 
shaven grass, flower-beds in geometrical figures, sym- 
metrical walks and terraces, and pillars and urns and 
statues, and trees and hedges clipped into unnatural 
shapes. Hundreds of writers since Macaulay have re- 
peated his comparison of Pope's poetry to a trim gar- 
den, and have said after him that such poetry could be 
enjoyed only in an age of hoops and periwigs. For the 
last fifty years Macaulay's vigorous caricature has domi- 
nated the public opinion about Pope. Pope's faults have 
been put in the foreground ; his merits have been 
admitted grudgingly ; his admirers have been obliged 
to adopt an apologetic tone. 

Pope, then, was the hero of the first part of our period, 
and the dethroned idol of its closing years, knocked 



12 MEN OF LETTERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

from his pedestal and rolled in the dust. Ought he to 
be set up again ? Not all the king's horses, nor all the 
king's men, could restore him to the place that he once 
occupied in public estimation, side by side with the 
greatest men in literature. But, on the other hand, 
there can be no doubt that the reaction against him in 
public estimation was carried much too far. His rank 
in public estimation — I wish to lay emphasis on that 
expression ; for, paradoxical as it may seem, I believe 
that among the few who make poetry a serious study — 
and there were such men in the eighteenth century as 
well as in the nineteenth (Macaulay cannot be included 
in the number) — there has been no substantial oscil- 
lation of opinion about the merits of Pope. They have 
felt that his range of subjects was limited, and that his 
power of expression was not of the very highest, but 
that within his limits and the measure of his power his 
execution was of unrivalled brilliancy. Wordsworth 
and Coleridge felt and acknowledged this, if not as 
heartily, at least as explicitly, as Byron and Campbell. 
It is true that Wordsworth and Coleridge and other 
disciples had not the same full sympathy with Pope's 
subject-matter, and consequently were less hearty in 
their acknowledgment of his excellences, and more dis- 
posed to dwell upon his defects. Byron, who had tried 
his hand at satire, was more forward to acknowledge 
the brilliant point and masterly condensation of Pope's 
work. But they were in substantial agreement in- 
tellectually. They knew equally well where Pope's 
strength lay, and where his weakness lay. They knew 
the master's hand, and they drew the line at its limita- 
tions. There was no such nice discrimination, however, 
in the public estimation of the poet, based upon the 
treatment of him by poetical and critical authorities. 
The general easy-going reader who does not, in Words- 
worth's language, make poetry a study, knows no 
middle station between good and bad, between admi- 



CRITICISM OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETS 13 

rable and the reverse. He either admires heartily or he 
is wholly uninterested and contemptuous. And in so 
far as he is influenced by authority, he is apt to be 
wholly led away by Avhat is put in the foreground, to 
look at this only, and neglect the qualifications ranged 
.in the middle distance and the background. Thus it 
happened that when Wordsworth's school, who put 
Pope's defects and limitations in the foreground, became 
the leaders of critical opinion, the hero of the eigh- 
teenth century was thrown from his pedestal in public 
estimation. It is a most difficult thing to gauge public 
opinion ; but a very fair test of it, as regards either 
men or measures, is to be found in the attitude of 
moderate advocates. If moderate advocates are apolo- 
getic and conciliatory, the man or the measure, we may 
be sure, does not stand high in the estimation of the 
public addressed. Now, applying this principle in the 
case of Pope, we find that in the eighteenth century, 
before his poetry had passed through the crucible of the 
Wordsworthian school, such a moderate critic as Joseph 
Warton had to be cautious in hinting at defects ; 
whereas in recent years such temperate admirers as Mr. 
Carruthers or Mr. Mark Pattison have to guard them- 
selves carefully against the charge of putting Pope's 
merits too high. Such incidents as these are significant 
of Pope's changed position between the accession of the 
first George and the demise of the last. He had fallen 
immeasurably in public estimation, and he was rated 
much below his deserts. 

Now, although it is impossible ever to restore Pope 
to the position he once occupied, it is our business here 
to try to obtain just ideas about poets, and to sweep 
away from our minds all artificial impediments to the 
enjoyment of various kinds and degrees of excellence in 
poetry — to clear our minds of prejudice and look at 
poets fairly for ourselves. The disciples of Wordsworth 
and Coleridge, in their wholesale condemnation of the 



14 MEN OF LETTERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

poetry of the eighteenth century, have fixed in the 
public mind a great many erroneous conceptions. We 
shall endeavor to see for ourselves, taking them one by 
one, what manner of men the eighteenth-century poets 
were, what aspirations they had in their art, and how 
their aspirations were limited by their personal character 
and circumstances, and by the circumstances of their 
times, especially by the ruling traditions of poetry in 
their respective generations. 

A very common impression about the poets of the 
eighteenth century is that they lived in slavish subjec- 
tion to a set of narrow and exclusive rules of criticism ; 
that they had no love for nature, either in scenery or in 
human affections or passions — a finicking race of artists, 
conventional and artificial, shuddering at Shakespeare as 
a wild and irregular genius, or, as Voltaire called him, 
an untutored savage. Now, if, with these prepossessions 
in your minds, you take up any eighteenth-century poet 
of rank, from Pope down to Hayley, one of George 
III.'s laureates, who represents the low-water mark of 
eighteenth-century poetry, and if you read the language 
in which they speak of nature and of Shakespeare, you 
will open your eyes in astonishment. Take, for example, 
the following passage : 

"A tree is a nobler object than a prince in his coronation robes. 
Education leads us from the admiration of beauty in natural 
objects to the admiration of artificial or customary excellence. I 
do not doubt but that a thoroughbred lady might admire the 
stars because they twinkle like so many candles on a birthnight." 

This is an extract not from Wordsworth, but from 
Spence's record of the conversation of Pope, of the poet 
whose poetry is compared to an artificial garden, and 
whose narrow and exclusive authority stifled the imagi- 
nation of the eighteenth century. The irony of Ma- 
caulay's comparison of Pope's poetry to an artificial 
garden lies in the fact that Pope had more to do than 



pope's criticism of shakespeaee's style 15 

any one else in destroying the fashion of artificial garden- 
ing in England, not merely by his ridicule of it, but by 
leading the new fashion of landscape gardening, in 
which a closer attempt is made to reproduce natural 
beauties. But, at least, it will be said, Pope spoke dis- 
paragingly of Shakespeare. Read the preface to his edi- 
tion of Shakespeare, for he took some trouble in editing 
Shakespeare, and you will see. It is true he once 
remarked to Spence that " it was mighty simple in Rowe 
to write a play professedly in Shakespeare's style — that 
is, professedly in the style of a bad age." But we must 
remember what it was in the style of Shakespeare's age 
that he considered bad. The particulars that he speci- 
fied as faults were such as have universally been con- 
sidered faults of style, and such as no writer has ever 
tried to imitate without making himself ridiculous. 
For example, Pope said that "Shakespeare generally 
used to stiffen his style with high words and metaphors 
for the speeches of kings and great men : he mistook it 
for a sign of greatness. This is strongest in his early 
plays ; but in his very last, his ' Othello,' what a forced 
language has he put into the mouth of his Duke of 
Venice." Now, it was probably not from mistaking it 
for a mark of greatness that Shakespeare stiffened his 
words in the speeches of great men, but because his 
audience expected it, because the stage demanded it ; 
still, whatever the reason, take any great man's speech 
in Shakespeare where the situation is not filled with pas- 
sion, and I think you will agree with the eighteenth- 
century critic that no style could be more intolerably 
bad. Do you ever at the theatre now listen to such 
speeches as those of the Duke of Venice, and what 
impression do they make upon you ? 

No : though Pope often heard his own age described 
as the Augustan age of English poetry, in which the art 
had been carried to a perfection unattained before, he 
was by no means insensible to the greatness of his 



16 MEN OF LETTERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

great predecessors, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and 
Milton. His conversations with Spence * afford abun- 
dant evidence of his catholicity as well as of his delicacy 
of judgment ; and if we pass from Pope to his successoi's 
in the eighteenth century, we find that we cannot num- 
ber disi'espect for Shakespeare among the causes of 
their poetic degeneracy, and that Nature was often in 
their mouths, if not in their hearts, as the great original 
from which the poet ought to draw. Their adoration 
of Shakespeare is not exceeded by the most reverential 
and least critical member of the New Shakespeare 
Society. Take Akenside, for example. When in 1749 
a French company played by subscription at Drury 
Lane, Akenside penned a most spirited remonstrance, 
which he put in the mouth of Shakespeare. He 
imagined our great poet insulted by this invasion of his 
domain. 

" "What though the footsteps of my devious Muse 
The measured walks of Grecian art refuse, 
Or though the frankness of my hardy style 
Mock the nice touches of the critic's file : 
Yet what my age and climate held to view 
Impartial I surveyed, and fearless drew. 
And say, ye skilful in the human heart, 
Who know to prize a poet's nohlest part, 
What age, what clime, could e'er an ampler field, 
For lofty thought, for daring fancy, yield ? 

" I saw this England break the shameful bands 
Forged for the souls of men by sacred hands ; 
I saw each groaning realm her aid implore ; 
Her sons the heroes of each warlike shore : 
Her naval standard (the dire Spaniard's bane) 
Obey'd through all the circuit of the main. 
Then too great Commerce, for a late found world, 
Around your coast her eager sails unfurled ? 

* " Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men," 
by the Rev. Joseph Spence. 



A PIONEER OF THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 17 

New hopes, new passions, thence the bosom fires, 
New plans, new arts, the genius thence inspires ; 
Thence every scene which private Fortune knows 
In stronger life with bolder spirit, rose." 

Take next Gray, who is sometimes spoken of as the 
crowning instance of the artificial poetry of the eigh- 
teenth century. How far he was from being a victim of 
a narrow and exclusive taste in literature we shall see 
afterward. He was one of the pioneers of the romantic 
movement ; he was a minute observer and an enthusias- 
tic worshipper of nature ; and he carried his admiration 
of artless poetry so far as to find beauties even in 
Lydgate, whom few of the admirers of early English 
poetry have even the patience to read. For Shakes- 
peare his enthusiasm was unbounded ; the poetry of his 
own age seemed poor and starved in comparison. 
" But," he says, in a metrical letter to his illustrator 
Bentley, in which he sighs for the artist's grace, and 
strength, and quick creation: 

" But not to one in this benighted age 
Is that diviner inspiration given 
That burns in Shakespeare's or in Milton's page, 
The pomp and prodigality of heaven." 

Gray visited Switzerland and Scotland and the Lake 
District ; and wrote enthusiastic descriptions of the 
scenery in letters to his friends. He vied with Words- 
worth in the sincerity of his passion for the Cumberland 
Lakes ; with Scott in his love for the Scottish High- 
lands. "I am," he wrote, "charmed with my expe- 
dition; it is of the Highlands I speak; the Lowlands 
are worth seeing once, but the mountains are ecstatic, 
and ought to be visited in pilgrimage once a year. 
None but these monstrous children of God know how to 
join so much beauty with so much horror. A fig for 
your poets, painters, gardeners, and clergymen that 
have not been among them; their imagination can be 
3 



18 MEN OP LETTERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

made up of nothing but bowling-greens, flowering 
shrubs, horse-ponds, Fleet ditches, shell-grottoes, and 
Chinese rails." 

I might multiply quotations to show that neither 
Shakespeare nor Nature was undervalued by the poets 
of the generation after Pope's. If their poetry was 
limited in amount and narrow in quality, it was not for 
want of a taste for better things. Criticism, in short, was 
busy preparing the way for the reception of a new race 
of poets by augmenting dissatisfaction with the poetry 
of the time, and creating a taste for something different. 
We see this spirit two generations after Pope, even in 
the works of the weak and amiable Hayley. Hayley 
was not a self-satisfied driveller; he was painfully con- 
scious of his own weakness, feeling, as he said himself : 

" Whene'er I touch the lyre 
My talents sink below my proud desire." 

We must not look upon him as a failure owing to the 
benumbing influence of narrow criticism. He repudi- 
ated critical authority in most valiant words. He 
denounced the "Classic Bigot" and " System's Haughty 
Son " as earnestly as the blindest disciple of the Lakers : 

" Thou wilt not hold me arrogant or vain, 
If I advise the young poetic train 
To deem infallible no Critic's word ; 
Not even the dictates of thy Attic Hurd : 
No ! not the Stagyrite's unquestioned page, 
The Sire of critics, sanctified by age ! 

How oft, my Romney, have I known thy vein 
Swell with indignant heat and gen'rous pain, 
To hear, in terms both arrogant and tame, 
. Some reas'ning Pedant on thy Art declaim ; 
Its laws and limits when his sov'reign taste 
With firm precision has minutely traced, 
And in the close of a decisive speech 
Pronounc'd some point beyond the Pencil's reach, 
How has thy Genius, by one rapid stroke, 
Refuted all the sapient things he spoke ! 



hayley's denunciation of the critics 19 

Thy Canvas placing, in the clearest light, 

His own Impossible before his sight ! 

O might the Bard who loves thy mental fire, 

Who to thy fame attun'd his early lyre, 

Learn from thy Genius, when dull Fops decide, 

So to refute their systematic pride ! 

Let him, at least, succeeding Poets warn 

To view the Pedant's lore with doubt or scorn, 

And e'en to question, with a spirit free, 

Establish'd Critics of the first degree ! " 

It was in the revival of the grand Epic that Hayley 
saw a possible future for Poetry, and Mason seemed to 
him the destined hero of this regeneration. 

" Ill-fated Poesy ! as human worth, 
Prais'd, yet unaided, often sinks to earth ; 
So sink thy powers ; not doom'd alone to know 
Scorn, or neglect, from an unfeeling Foe, 
But destin'd more oppressive wrong to feel 
From the misguided Friend's perplexing zeal. 

What ! is the Epic Muse, that lofty Fair, 
Who makes the discipline of Earth her care ! 
That mighty Minister, whom Virtue leads 
To train the noblest minds to noblest deeds ! 
Is she, in office great, in glory rich, 
Degraded to a poor, pretended Witch, 
Who rais'd her spells, and all her magic power, 
But on the folly of the favouring hour ? 
Whose dark, despised illusions melt away 
At the clear dawn of Philosophic day ? " 

He examines the received opinion that supernatural 
agency is necessary to the Epic, and denounces and 
derides all systematic rules. A great Epic might be 
achieved if the subject were taken from British history. 

" By some strange fate, which rul'd each Poet's tongue, 
Her dearest Worthies yet remain unsung. 
Critics there are, who, with a scornful smile, 
Reject the annals of our martial Isle, 



20 MEN OF LETTEES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

And, dead to patriot Passion, coldly deem 
They yield for lofty Song no touching theme. 
"What ! can the British heart, humanely brave, 
Feel for the Greek who lost his female slave ? 
And shall it not with keener zeal embrace 
Their brighter cause, who, born of British race, 
With the strong cement of the blood they spilt, 
The splendid fane of British Freedom built? " 

Liberty, brooding over tbis neglect, invites Mason to 
undertake the task. 

" Justly on thee th' inspiring Goddess calls ; 
Her mighty task each weaker Bard appalls ; 
'Tis thine, O Mason ! with unbaffled skill, 
Each harder duty of our Art to fill ; 
'Tis thine in robes of beauty to array, 
And in bright Order's lucid blaze display, 
The forms that Fancy, to thy wishes kind, 
Stamps on the tablet of thy clearer mind. 
How softly sweet thy notes of pathos swell, 
The tender accents of Elfrida tell ; 
Caractacus proclaims, with Freedom's fire, 
How rich the tone of thy sublimer Lyre ; 
E'en in this hour, propitious to thy fame, 
The rural Deities repeat thy name ; 
With festive joy I hear the sylvan throng 
Hail the completion of their favourite Song." 

I tbink I have quoted enougb to sbow you that the 
eighteenth-century poets were not, on principle at least, 
enamoured of trimness and primness in art, or insensi- 
ble to the wild irregular strength and beauty of nature. 
They did not of set choice and with deliberate acquies- 
cence confine themselves to a low range of imagination, 
looking up from their comfortable artifical gardens with 
supercilious or cynical contempt on the loftier flights of 
poetry. If the age was comparatively barren of the 
higher poetry, the explanation is not to be found in the 
predominance of narrow and exclusive critical theories. 



CHAPTER II 

POPE 

BRIEF LITERARY BIOGRAPHY — HIS POEMS FALL INTO THREE 
PERIODS — ECLOGUES AND THE DISCUSSION AS TO THE MERITS 
OF PASTORAL POETRY — WALSH— CONNECTION BETWEEN ENG- 
LISH PASTORALS AND ALLAN RAMSAY AND BURNS— POPE AND 
PHILIPS 

If you take a cursory glance at the list of Pope's 
works and their subjects, you will see that they fall 
naturally into three divisions or periods : (1) The 
poems by which he acquired liis reputation, his "Pas- 
torals," his " Windsor Forest," his " Essay on Criti- 
cism," his "Rape of the Lock " — all written during the 
reign of Queen Anne ; (2) his translations of Homer, 
by which he enlarged his reputation and his fortune, 
his principal occupation during the reign of George I.; 
(3) the satirical and moral poems, with which he crowned 
his reputation, and seriously compromised his character. 
This is an obvious division, apparent on the surface ; 
and if you look deeper, you will find that there is more 
justification for it than there generally is. There is 
often a disadvantage in dividing the works of an artist 
into periods ; it is often misleading. You are apt to 
imagine that at each period a complete transformation 
has passed over the style or the spirit of the man's 
work ; that he has become a new creation, working 
with entirely different aims and powers ; and that the 
work of each period is sharply marked off from that of 
every other. There is a tendency in this way to break 
up and disperse the individuality of the man, to confuse 
his identity. Now, the artist is himself in all periods ; 

31 



22 pope 

in any period he is more like himself than like any body 
else ; any two periods of his work have more in com- 
mon with each other than they have with any period 
of another man's work, supposing him to be a great 
artist, an artist of marked and masterful individuality. 
It only happens that some men at certain stages come 
under new influences from without, or new impulses 
from within, the effect of which is distinctly traceable 
in their work, though not to the extent of blurring 
their individuality. This happens more or less to all 
men, but it is only when the new influence becomes for 
the time paramount that there is any advantage in 
separating the whole productions of a man's lifetime 
into periods. When the development has been slow 
and equable, as in the case of Chaucer, or Shakespeare, 
or Gray, or Wordsworth, or Tennyson, when the 
course of the poet's activity has received no violent and 
sudden bent from new circumstances or new impulses, 
there is no advantage in dividing his work into periods. 

In the case of Pope circumstances did interfere 
materially with the direction of his poetic labors, and 
two important epochs or turning-points can be distinctly 
specified. The first was when his early successes trans- 
ferred him from the influences of his father's family and 
his home circle of acquaintances to the very different 
world of London society, when boyish ambitions and 
enthusiasms underwent a transformation. If these 
ambitions had been allowed free play, he would not 
have translated Homer. This was a money-making 
enterprise, instigated by the worldly spirit that then 
passed into him from new and fashionable acquaintances. 
The second epoch was when his independence had been 
secured by the success of his translations, and he was 
free to follow the guidance and stimulation of his friends 
Arbuthnot, Swift, and Bolingbroke, and abandoned his 
powers to the service of personal and party strife 

Pope was born in the year of the Revolution, 1688. 



.. 



HIS DESULTORY EDUCATION" 23 

His father, who was a London merchant, retired from 
business in that year, and went to live at Binfield in 
Windsor Forest. The most influential fact in Pope's 
family circumstances was the religion of his father, who 
was a Roman Catholic. This probably influenced the 
father in retiring from business when the Catholic James 
II. was driven from the throne and the Protestant 
William took his place. Farther, it influenced the 
education of Pope in two ways. The public schools 
were closed to him, and he received very little regular 
education. He was taught to read by an aunt, the 
widow of the portrait-painter Cooper, who left him at 
her death, when he was five years old, all her " bookes, 
pictures, and medalls sett in gold or otherwise." At the 
age of eight he was taught the rudiments of Latin and 
Greek by the family priest ; then he was sent for a time 
to a little school at Twyf ord, near Winchester, in Hamp- 
shire, then for a time to another in Marylebone, then to 
a third at Hyde Park Corner in London ; then he read 
for a time under the care of another priest ; but at the 
age of twelve he was left entirely to his own resources. 
This desultory education, leaving him to read at will, 
was probably an advantage for a studious boy, who 
could not remember when he began to make verses of 
his own invention, who compiled a play for his school- 
fellows before he was twelve, and had such a veneration 
for poets and poetry that as a small school-boy he 
ventured into Will's Coffee-house that he might have 
the pleasure of seeing and hearing Dryden, the greatest 
English poet then living. These little facts show how 
precocious Pope was both in poetic sensibility and in 
ambition. When his father, who was probably anxious 
for his health, took him from school in London to live 
at home in the Forest, he plunged with delight into a 
miscellaneous course of reading in poetry, and he not 
only read, but imitated. His school education had been 
too scrappy to make him expert in construing foreign 



24 pope 

languages ; he could barely construe Tully's Offices, he 
says, when he left school; but in the course of the pre- 
vious century all poets of note, — Greek, Latin, Italian, 
and French, — had been translated into English verse, 
and with the help of these translations the ardent student 
had no difficulty in mastering the sense. " Mr. Pope," 
Spence says, " thought himself the better in some 
respects for not having had a regular education. He 
(as he observed in particular) read originally for the 
sense, whereas we are taught for so many years to read 
only for words." Nor, although the boy was left 
entirely free to read what he pleased, was he left alto- 
gether without friendly guidance. Here, again, the 
family Catholicism was serviceable to him ; it was an 
advantage to belong to a proscribed sect. The members 
of such a sect always hold much more closely together 
without distinctions of rank ; distinctions of rank and 
station are levelled by their common political disabili- 
ties. Hence it happened that Catholic families in the 
neighborhood, of good position and literary culture, 
who would probably not have visited the retired linen- 
draper if he had belonged to the established religion, 
made the acquaintance of him and of his precocious son, 
and helped the latter with encouragement and advice in 
his reading and in the first flights of his genius. In 
particular, Sir W. Trumbull, a retired diplomatist, living 
at Easthampstead, within a few miles of Binfield, made 
a companion of the boy, and directed him to the study 
of the French critics. Through another Catholic 
family, the Blounts of Mapledurham, one of whom, Mrs. 
Martha Blount, was his attached friend in his last years, 
Pope made the acquaintance of Wycherley and Henry 
Cromwell, and through them of Walsh and Granville, 
all poets and keen critics of literature. 

Thus, while Pope's sensibilities were still fresh, and his 
whole nature docile and pliable, he was guided into the 
very middle of the literary current of his time, and left 



EARLY EFFORTS 25 

to paddle at his own sweet will in backwaters and eddies. 
The eager and ambitious boy was, in fact, stimulated to 
the very utmost of his powers, and directed to strive 
with all his energies after what was then considered 
literary excellence by the highest authorities. We can 
see in his early efforts traces of a clear-sighted purpose, 
while trying to do what was then certain of winning 
applause, to choose subjects that had not been already 
appropriated by great poets, and in which success was 
still open to all comers. It was then a critical maxim 
that the highest work of which the human mind was 
capable was a great epic, and many treatises had been 
written in French and in English, in prose and in verse, 
on the principles of epic poetry. Sir Richard Black- 
more, Avhile Pope was at school, had attempted an epic 
on the subject of Arthur. It was a ponderous failure. 
Pope began an epic about the age of twelve. The sub- 
ject was mythological, the hero being Alcander, a prince 
of Rhodes. It was, he told Spence, " about two years in 
hand." In later life he considered that it was better 
planned than Blackmore's, though equally slavish an 
imitation of the ancients ; but he never published it, and 
it was finally burned by the advice of Atterbury. Even 
in his boyhood Pope had judgment enough to understand 
that his powers were not yet sufficiently mature for 
original composition, and he resolved to perfect them in 
the first place by imitations of his predecessors. Walsh 
advised him that there was one praise yet open to English 
poets, the praise of correctness. In Pope's boyhood 
the most successful poetical publication had been Dry- 
den's translation of Virgil. What Dryden had trans- 
lated, Pope did not presume to meddle with. Dryden 
was his hero, his model, his great exemplar. But he 
proceeded to take translations of classics by less eminent 
poets, and try to improve upon them. With this ambi- 
tion he translated the first book of the " Thebaid " of 
Statius, whom he considered the most eminent Latin epic 



26 pope 

poet next to Virgil, several of Ovid's " Heroic Epistles," 
and a considerable part of the " Metamorphoses," besides 
passages from Homer. It was one of Pope's vanities to 
try to give the impression that his metrical skill was 
even more precocious than it was ; and we cannot accept 
his published versions of Statius and Ovid as evidence of 
his proficiency at the age of fifteen or sixteen, the date, 
according to his own assertion, of their composition, 
though they were not published for several years after- 
ward. But it is ascertained matter of fact that, by the 
time he was sixteen, his skill in verse was such as to 
astonish veteran critics like Wycherley and Walsh, and 
that his verses were handed about in manuscript, and 
admired by men who were then in the foremost walks 
of letters. 

Pope spent eight or nine years in this arduous and 
enthusiastic discipline, reading, studying, experimenting, 
poetry his only business and idleness his only pleasure, 
before any thing of his appeared in print. In these pre- 
liminary studies he seems to have guided himself by the 
maxim, formulated in a letter to Walsh, July 2, 1706, 
that "it seems not so much the perfection of sense to 
say things that have never been said before, as to express 
those best that have been said oftenest." * His first pub- 
lication was his " Pastorals." Jacob Tonson, the book- 
seller, had heard these pastorals highly spoken of, and 
he sent a polite note to Pope asking that he might have 
them for one of his miscellanies. They appeared ac- 
cordingly in May, 1709, at the end of a volume con- 
taining contributions from Philips, Sheffield, Garth, 
and Rowe. We can see how Pope was induced to make 
his first essay in pastorals. Dryden's translation of 
Virgil's " Eclogues " had drawn attention to this species 
of composition. Walsh had written a critical preface to 

* " True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, 

"What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." 



THE AIMS OF THE PASTORAL POET 27 

Dryden's translation, in which he laid down the rules 
of pastoral poetry, and severely trounced M. Fontenelle, 
a fashionable French writer of pastorals, for his viola- 
tion of the rules. 

This artificial species of poetry has been almost uni- 
versally ridiculed as tedious and insipid from the time 
of Pope to the present day. It is not worth while to 
waste much time over it ; but as it is often condemned 
hastily, and in ignorance of what it proposed to attempt, 
it is only justice to Pope, and it may be of some inter- 
est, to consider what were the aims of the pastoral poet 
as conceived by Pope and Walsh. They did not pre- 
tend to imitate any incidents in the lives of actual 
shepherds. Theocritus did this, and Allan Ramsay. 
But the shepherds of Pope and Walsh were avowedly 
the shepherds of the golden age, when the best of men 
were employed in shepherding — men, as Walsh says, 
" of learning and good breeding." These shepherds 
were assumed to be men of the most delicate and gentle 
feelings, living a life of simplicity and calm tranquillity, 
never agitated by harsh and violent passions. Any 
tender feeling that ruffled their lives was softened and 
subdued by the steady repose and quiet, placid beauty 
of their surroundings, and the mute sympathy of nature 
with their woes. Realize the still and tranquil beauty 
of this ancient pastoral world, and you will admit that it 
was a fine conception. The poets of this world did not 
trouble themselves to argue that such a world ever 
really existed ; they admitted that it never existed ex- 
cept as a beautiful fiction. Such was the conception of 
this species of poetry held by a school of critics among 
whom Pope had personal friends. You will find it 
set forth at length in Walsh's preface to Dryden's 
translation of Virgil, in which minute rules are deduced 
for bringing details into harmony with this general 
design. Now, this being the aim of the ideal pastoral, 
to give lyric expression to the joys and the sorrows, the 



28 pope 

loves and the griefs, of imaginary beings in imaginary 
circumstances, I think you will see that many of the 
criticisms passed on Pope's " Pastorals " are beside the 
mark. He has been censured for not doing what he 
could not have done without being inconsistent with 
his original design. Mr. Elwin, for example, Pope's 
truculent editor, who has examined every line in Pope 
with inveterate hostility, but apparently never lifted his 
eyes from details to consider Pope's work as a whole, 
says : " Originality was impossible when Pope's only 
notion of legitimate pastoral was a slavish mimicry of 
classical remains. Had he drawn his materials from 
the English landscape before his eyes, from the English 
characters about his doors, and from the English usages 
and moods of thought in his own day, he would have 
discovered a thousand particulars in which he had not 
been anticipated by Greeks and Romans. He neg- 
lected this inexhaustible territory, and bestowed so 
little attention upon the realities around him that, 
though his descriptions are confined to the barest 
generalities, they are not unfrequently false." 

If Pope had acted on this advice, no doubt he might 
have written a much more generally interesting poem, 
with more of flesh and blood and passion in it, but it 
would not have been the kind of poem that he intended 
to write. Johnson's criticism is more to the point when 
he says that the pastoral form of poetry is "easy, 
vulgar, and therefore disgusting ; whatever images it 
can supply are long ago exhausted ; and its inherent 
improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the 
mind." This is strong criticism, but perfectly fail*. 
Johnson was thinking more particularly of elegiac 
pastoral poetry — poems in which poets lamented the 
death of friends under the fiction that they were 
shepherds ; and he condemned this kind of poetry as a 
whole, partly because it gave an air of affectation to 
the poet's grief, and partly because there was nothing 



Steele's criticism op pastoral elegies 29 

new to be said. He fully recognized what the poet 
intended to do, but held that it was not worth doing. 
The same criticism had been passed on occasional pas- 
toral elegies by Steele in the thirtieth number of the 
Guardian (April 15, 1713). Steele complained that 
they were too much on one plan : 

" I must, in the first place, observe that our country- 
men have so good an opinion of the ancients, and think 
so modestly of themselves, that the generality of pas- 
toral writers have either stolen all from the Greeks and 
Romans, or so servilely imitated their manners and 
customs as makes them very ridiculous. In looking 
over some English pastorals a few days ago I perused 
at least fifty lean flocks, and reckoned up an hundred 
left-handed ravens, besides blasted oaks, withering 
meadows, and weeping deities. Indeed, most of the 
occasional pastorals we have are built upon one and the 
same plan. A shepherd asks his fellow, ' Why he is so 
pale ? If his favorite sheep hath straj^ed ? If his pipe 
be broken ? Or Phyllis unkind?' He answers, ' None 
of these misfortunes have befallen him, but one much 
greater, for Damon (or sometimes the god Pan) is dead.' 
This immediately causes the other to make complaints, 
and call upon the lofty pines and silver streams to join 
in the lamentation. While he goes on, his friend inter- 
rupts him, and tells him that Damon lives, and shows 
him a track of light in the skies to confirm it, then 
invites him to chestnuts and cheese. Upon this scheme 
most of the noble families in Great Britain have been 
comforted ; nor can I meet with any right honorable 
shepherd that doth not die and live again, after the 
manner of the aforesaid Damon." 

There is not room for much variety in such poetry, 
the personages of which are simple people with few 
interests and few cares. Undoubtedly Milton's 
"Lycidas," apropos of which Johnson made his sweep- 
ing condemnation, is an exception to the general lame- 



30 pope 

ness of these pastoral elegies. The exquisitely sweet 
and rich music of his verse would have redeemed the 
most trite and easy of conceptions. But the pastoral 
elegy was so common in the years between Milton and 
Johnson that the critic might have been pardoned a 
strong expression of his weariness of the poem, though 
this criticism of Milton is one of the aberrations of his 
generally sound judgment of poetry and generally true 
feeling for poetic excellence. At least he must be 
allowed to have confined his criticism to the kind of 
poetry which the author intended to produce. He did 
not censure him because he had not done what he could 
not have done without deviating into another kind of 
poetry. To have put into the golden age the manners 
of country folk as they were to be seen near his own 
doors would not have been an excellence. That the 
imaginary manners of a fanciful golden age can never 
possess deep human interest is of course true enough, 
and Pope's " Pastorals " cannot claim a high rank as 
poetry. Johnson's criticism of them shows his usual 
good-sense and sanity. "To charge these pastorals," 
he says, " with want of invention is to require what was 
never intended. The imitations are so ambitiously fre- 
quent that the writer evidently means rather to show 
his literature than his wit. It is surely sufficient for an 
author of sixteen not only to be able to copy the poems 
of antiquity with judicious selection, but to have ob- 
tained sufficient power of language and skill in metre 
to exhibit a series of versification which had in English 
poetry no precedent, nor has since had an imitation." 

Johnson remarks upon " the close thought " shown in 
the composition of the " Pastorals " : " Pope's ' Pas- 
torals ' are not, however, composed but with close 
thought ; they have reference to the times of the day, 
the seasons of the year, and the periods of human life." 
"Windsor Forest" is more open than the "Four Pas- 
torals " to the charge of incongruously and incorrectly 



GREAT RESULT OF THE CRAZE FOR PASTORALS 31 

mixing up heathen deities with modern circumstances, 
archaic conventional fancies with modern realities. 
There is a cold artificiality about such lines as these : 

" See Pan with flocks, with fruits Pomona crown'd ; 
Here blushing Flora paints th' enamel'd ground ; 
Here Ceres' gifts in waving prospect stand, 
And nodding tempt the joyful reaper's hand." 

Pan and Pomona, and Flora and Ceres, have little life for 
their few English readers. Still, after discounting such 
lines, and the extravagant praise of Granville, and the 
ludicrous comparison of Queen Anne to Diana, there 
are many beautiful passages. Pope's observation of 
nature was admitted by Wordsworth, and his micro- 
scopic fidelity is remarked on by M. Taine. "Every 
aspect of nature," says Taine, " was observed ; a sun- 
rise, a landscape reflected in the water, a breeze amid 
the foliage, and so forth. Ask Pope to paint in verse 
an eel, a perch, or a trout ; he has the exact phrase 
ready ; we might glean from him the contents of a 
Gradus." 

We may remark, as illustrating the close connection 
of one literary event with another, and the way in which 
literary influences are handed down, that the same craze 
for Pastorals which produced Pope's juvenile exercises, 
by one impulse after another, sending out waves in all 
directions as from a centre of disturbance in a pool, gave 
us the poetry of Burns. Kindled by the theories and 
the practice of the English wits and poets, Allan Ramsay 
wrote real pastoral poetry, exhibiting the customs, the 
dress, the games, the domestic sorrows, the loves, 
and the lives of real shepherds. And the " Gentle 
Shepherd" awoke the genius of Burns. This great 
result may excuse us for dwelling so long on Pastoral 
poetry in the reign of Queen Anne. 

Pope professed to have written both his " Pastorals " 
and "Windsor Forest" in 1704 or 1705, at the age of 



32 pope 

sixteen, only adding to the latter the passage about the 
Peace. Probably he had retouched them, as they lay by 
him. It was part of his vanity to pretend to have been 
even more precocious than he was, a foible that has been 
severely commented on. 

These " Pastorals " led to one of the first of Pope's 
celebrated literary quarrels, which is often referred to 
as an example of his irritable jealousy and subtle under- 
hand proceedings. This has been discussed at great 
length and in a spirit of bitter hostility to Pope by Mr. 
El win — at great length, and yet with the omission of 
important circumstances, if his object was to prove that 
Pope was the aggressor. 

In the volume of Tonson's Miscellanies in 1709 in 
which Pope's " Pastorals " appeared, the first place was 
occupied by a set of Pastorals by Ambrose Philips, — 
" Namby Pamby," — in every way inferior to Pope's. 
Four years afterward, on April 6, IV 13, appeared in the 
Guardian, edited by Steele, the first of a series of 
papers on Pastoral Poetry — discussing pastoral poets 
from Theocritus downward, and stating the principles 
of the art. Really these papers were a covert puff of 
Philips. Modern pastoral poets were ridiculed for in- 
troducing Greek rural deities, Greek flowers and fruits 
(hyacinths and Prestan roses), Greek names of shepherds 
(Damon and Thyrsis, and so forth), Greek sports and 
customs and religious rites. They ought to make use 
of English rural mythology, hob-thrushes, fairies, gob- 
lins, and witches ; they should give English names to 
their shepherds ; they should mention flowers indige- 
nous to English climate and soil ; and they should intro- 
duce English proverbial sayings, dress, and customs. 
All excellent principles, afterward followed by Allan 
Ramsay. But the Guardian proceeded to cite Philips 
as an English poet who had fulfilled these conditions, 
and consequently established for himself a place side by 
side with Theocritus, and Virgil, and Spenser. Philips 



POPE RETALIATES ON STEELE 33 

was the eldest born of Spenser. Pope was never men- 
tioned as a pastoral poet, though a few lines were quoted 
from one of his imitations of Chaucer. 

Now, Pope was bitterly angry at this, and he took 
what Mr. Elwin considers a mean revenge. He sent to 
Steele a paper professing to be a continuation of the 
papers on Pastoral Poetry, reviewing the poems of Mr. 
Pope by the light of these principles. Ostensibly Pope 
was censured for breaking these rules, and Philips was 
praised for observing them. It was a most cutting piece 
of irony, passages being cited from Philips where he 
had complied with all the precepts of the Guardian, and 
yet had written the most insipid commonplace. Pope 
himself, though ostensibly condemned, was really exalted, 
being described in one place as having " deviated into 
downright poetry." 

When the paper was sent to him, Steele, misled by 
the opening sentences, was at first unwilling to publish 
a direct attack on Pope, and asked Pope's leave to print 
it, which was graciously granted. 

Elwin severely condemns this as a mean, spiteful, 
underhand trick, and declares that Pope's vanity made 
him the aggressor. I own to having some sympathy 
with the fun of the thing ; but, apart from that, I don't 
think that Mr. Elwin has made out that Pope was the 
aggressor. In spite of his labored argument, he has 
omitted several cardinal circumstances, allowing, as is 
his custom, a few points to carry him away, while he 
does not look at the whole. 

The papers in the Guardian were really a covert 
attack on Pope. What were the circumstances ? Pope's 
" Windsor Forest," a pastoral, appeared in the beginning 
of March. It contained a eulogy of the Peace of Utrecht, 
the great achievement of the Tory Ministry, to which 
Steele and Addison and the Whig coterie were far from 
friendly. A few weeks afterward appeared a series of 
papers on Pastoral Poetry, in which Pope was studiously 
3 



34 pope 

ignored, and a feeble poetaster, his rival in that kind o( 
poetry, extravagantly lauded. I should call that mean 
and underhand, and Pope's method of retaliation strikes 
me as simply highly ingenious and amusing, and not 
unfair. A magnanimous man would have passed by the 
slight without notice ; but if a man did condescend to 
notice it, as Pope did, his crime was not of a very black 
dye. He only hoisted the enemy with their own petard. 



CHAPTER III 

pope — continued 

" ESSAY ON CRITICISM " — SUPPOSED TYRANNY OP POPE — ATTI- 
TUDE OF POPE, GRAY, ETC., TOWARD CLASSICAL TRADITION — 
REVIEW OF THEORIES ACCOUNTING FOR THE POETIC STERILITY 
OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

Our starting-point to-day, the " Essay on Criticism," 
was published in 1711, midway between the "Pastorals" 
and " Windsor Forest." 

An excellent rule occurs at 1. 253 : 

" Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, 
Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be. 
In ev'ry work regard the writer's end, 
Since none can compass more than they intend." 

What was Pope's end? He wrote the "Essay on 
Criticism " for the entertainment of the cultivated 
people, men and women of wit and learning in his time, 
who were greatly interested in the art of poetry. It 
belongs to the class of poems called Didactic, but the 
object of such poems is not instruction, even when they 
state and illustrate rules of conduct. The object of 
poetry is to give immediate pleasure. When Virgil 
wrote his " Georgics," his object was not to lay down 
practical rules for the husbandman, but to present a 
beautiful picture of country life. Darwin's " Botanic 
Garden " was meant, not to serve the same purpose as 
lectures on botany, but to give pretty pictures of plants 
and their habits. So in Pope's "Essay on Man " his 
object is not to write an ethical or theological treatise, 
but to give pointed and brilliant expression to certain 

35 






36 POPE 

views of man's character, of his position in the universe, 
and of his destiny. This might be indirectly instructive, 
by furnishing people with striking and easily remem- 
bered reflections as maxims of conduct, but the poet's 
primary purpose was to charm and delight by the novelty 
of his expression. 

In the " Essay on Criticism " his purpose is less 
lofty — he did not strive to lead his readers into the same 
lofty region of delightful emotion. His purpose was 
simply to condense, methodize, and give as perfect and 
novel expression as he could to floating opinions about 
the poet's aims and methods, and the critic's duties to 

" What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." 

He was keenly interested in the subject himself, as day 
by day he read and meditated on the subject in his 
quiet home at Binfield ; and so were his acquaintances. 
He took for granted that the town, the coffee-houses, 
and the drawing-rooms would also be interested ; and he 
was not disappointed. The work excellently served its 
primary purpose of giving pleasure to the town. 

He expounded many commonplaces so admirably, so 
perfectly, so happily, that ever since they have been 
quoted in the form he gave them, e. g.: 

"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." — 1. 625. 

" The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, 
With loads of learned lumber in his head." — 1. 612. 

" Good-nature and good-sense must ever join ; 
To err is human ; to forgive, divine." — 1. 525. 

" True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, 
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance." — 1. 362. 

" Expression is the dress of thought." — 1. 318. 

" 'Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call, 
But the joint force and full result of all." — 1. 245. 



"essay on criticism" 37 

" A little learning is a dang'rous thing." — 1. 215. 

" From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part, 
And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art." — 1. 152. 

Now, a writer who makes expressions by means of smart 
epigram, startling instances, and brilliant illustration his 
chief aims, and chooses topics of knowledge and opinion 
rather than feeling, is not, strictly speaking, a poet, even 
if he writes in verse. We do not call him a poet, but 
a rhetorician. We call a man a poet who touches our 
feelings by means of words, as a painter or a sculptor 
does by painted canvas or chiselled stone. But rhetori- 
cians in verse are capable of giving us much delight by 
presenting our beliefs in new and unexpected lights, and 
this was what Pope did in his " Essay on Criticism." We 
do not always find ourselves in agreement with the 
opinions expressed, but the expression is always vivid, 
and often most felicitous. 

Johnson criticises Pope's precept regarding the use of 
" representative metre," as stated in the lines : 

" 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence, 
The sound should seem an echo to the sense." 

"This notion," says Johnson, "has produced, in my 
opinion, many wild conceits and imaginary beauties. 
All that can furnish this representation are the sounds 
of the words considered singly, and the time in which 
they are pronounced." 

Here he makes the mistake of assuming that the 
rhythm is determined solely by the number of accented 
and unaccented syllables — by the pauses and the 
syllables in and out of accent. He quotes a passage in 
which the numbers are the same as in Pope's translation 
of Homer's description of Sisyphus rolling the stone up 
the hill. In the description of Sisyphus the sound seems 
adapted to the sense, and yet here is another set of 
verses in the same number which do not convey the 



38 pope 

same feeling of effort. Johnson argues that the reason 
must be simply that the subject is different ; the num- 
bers are the same, but the meaning being different, we 
estimate the sound by the meaning. "The mind often 
governs the ear, and the sounds are estimated by their 
meaning." Johnson forgets that the quantity of the 
vowels and the difficulty of the consonants affect the 
rhythm. 

If I am to spend so much time over Pope's early 
poems, how am I to cover in twenty lectures the poetry 
of the four Georges ? I can, of course, in such a short 
course, attempt only to give you some idea of the lead- 
ing artistic aims of poetry in that period, the poetic 
ideals, what the poets tried to do, what we are to look 
for in their poetry, and how they came to have these 
aims. And upon these enquiries we get much light from 
these early poems of Pope, because they were written 
under the direct influence of the arbiters of good taste 
in writing in his time. In the " Essay on Criticism " he 
puts these standards of good taste into brilliant words, 
and so helped to perpetuate their influence. But their 
influence was exerted in many forms that could not be 
put into words, because the men of the time were not 
conscious of them. 

One of the favorite ways of accounting for the bar- 
renness of the eighteenth century is to say that the 
poets, influenced by Pope, were subject to narrow and 
exclusive rules of criticism, that they were slavishly 
subservient to the ancients, writing only according to 
these precedents, and that, consequently, their poetry 
was dull and artificial and wanting in nature. I believe 
this to be a shallow theory, held in entire ignorance of 
the great forces that control and shape the poetry of 
living generations of men. Reverence for the ancients, 
more particularly for the Roman ancients Virgil and 
Horace, was undoubtedly an influence in the time of 
Pope ; but it was only a slight influence then, and in 



INFLUENCE OP THE ANCIENT POETS 39 

the subsequent generations of the century it was not an 
influence at all. 

Let us see what exactly was meant by this subservience 
to the ancients. At first sight it would look as if Pope 
had no reverence for the ancients, but proposed to him- 
self quite an independent standard — namely, Nature : 

" First follow Nature, and your judgment frame 
By her just standard, which is still the same : 
Unerring Nature still divinely bright, 
One clear, unchang'd, and universal light, 
Life, force, and beauty must to all impart 
At once the source, and end, and test of Art. 
Art from that fund each just supply provides ; 
Works without show, and without pomp presides." 

But, if we read on, we come upon several passages 
that seem to betray a slavish admiration for the 
ancients : 

" You then whose judgment the right course would steer, 
Know well each Ancient's proper character ; 
His fable, subject, scope in ev'ry page ; 
Religion, country, genius of his age ; 
Without all these at once before your eyes, 
Cavil you may, but never criticise. 
Be Homer's works your study and delight, 
Read them by day, and meditate by night ; 
Thence form your judgment, thence your maxims bring, 
And trace the muses upward to their spring. 
Still with itself compar'd, his text peruse, 
And let your comment be the Mantuan muse. 
When first young Maro in his boundless mind 
A work t'outlast immortal Rome designed, 

Nature and Homer were, he found, the same. 
Convinced, amaz'd, he checks the bold design ; 
And rules as strict his labour'd work confine, 
As if the Stagyrite o'erlook'd each line. 
Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem ; 
To copy Nature is to copy them." 



40 pope 

Again, in speaking of the breach of these rules, he 
declares : 

" But though the ancients thus their rules invade 
(As kings dispense with laws themselves have made), 
Moderns, beware ! or if you must offend 
Against the precept, ne'er transgress its end ; 
Let it be seldom, and compell'd by need ; 
And have, at least, their precedent to plead. 
The critic else proceeds without remorse, 
Seizes your fame, and puts his laws in force." 

The case now seems very strong for Pope's subservience 
to the ancients. This is strengthened by looking at 
the general scope of his works. He spent ten years in 
translating Homer ; ten more in professedly imitating 
Horace. 

But look a little deeper, and you will see that Pope 
craftily qualifies his subservience to the ancients. Their 
rules must be observed, but then their rules are very 
vague and general; there is much in the poet's art 
that they cannot teach ; and even if they are broken, 
success justifies the transgressor : 

" Some beauties yet no precepts can declare, 
For there's a happiness as well as care. 
Music resembles poetry, in each ~\ 

Are nameless graces which no methods teach, > 
And which a master-hand alone can reach. ) 
If where the rules not far enough extend 
(Since rules were made but to promote their end), 
Some lucky license answer to the full 
Th' intent propos'd, that license is a rule. 
Thus Pegasus, a nearer way to take, 
May boldly deviate from the common track ; 
From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part, 
And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art." 

This is surely a sufficient declaration of independence. 
'Obey their rules when it suits you. 

But then Pope goes on to allow this license only to 



A HIT AT MECHANICAL CRITICS 41 

the ancients. " Moderns, beware," he says, and for this 
interdict on the moderns he is severely censured by Mr. 
Elwin. If Mr. Elwin had had a little more nimbleness 
of spirit, and consequently been able to understand the 
quick and subtle wit and sly humor of Pope, he might 
have seen that Pope was here laughing in his sleeve at 
mechanical critics : 

" I know there are, to whose presumptuous thoughts 
Those freer beauties, ev'n in them, seem faults, 

Most critics, fond of some subservient art, 
Still make the whole depend upon a part : 
They talk of principles, but notions prize, 
And all to one lov'd folly sacrifice. 

Thus critics of less judgment than caprice, 
Curious not knowing, not exact but nice, 
Form short ideas ; and offend in arts 
(As most in manners) by a love to parts." 

Pope, then, left himself full liberty to depart from 
the ancients when he chose — and he took it. Even his 
translation of Homer was a very free translation. "A 
very fine poem, Mr. Pope, but it is not Homer," was 
Bentley's remark. His imitations of Horace are among 
his most original poems, according to Pattison ; and 
every-body will agree that they are most original. 

Pope's submission to the ancient masters was not 
slavish or subservient. He studied them as great mas- 
ters ought to be studied when they are not read simply 
for enjoyment. He studied them with a mind open to 
receive impulse and suggestion from their example. 

Were Pope's eighteenth-century successors slavishly 
submissive to the ancients? Pope died in 1744, when 
there was more than half of the century to run. I will 
not weary you with quotations, but I could quote many 
passages from Akenside, Gray, Churchill, to show that 



42 pope 

Pope's successors exalted Shakespeare, who broke many 
of Aristotle's rules, 

" Above all Greek, above all Roman fame." 

I have quoted already one passage from Hayley, late in 
the century, feeblest of poets, to show how little they 
were repressed by the rules of the ancients. Valiant 
protestation of contempt for rules is not always a sign 
of strength, but I don't think it was the rules of the 
ancients that kept down eighteenth-century poetry. A 
mechanical-minded ecclesiastical place-hunter — Mason 
— tried to write tragedies on the Greek model and failed. 
Was it wit? An outrageous admiration for brilliant 
expression, for highly polished epigram ? Well, even 
Pope did not consider that wit was every thing : 

" Some to conceit alone their taste confine, 
And glitt'ring thoughts struck out at ev'ry line ; 
Pleas'd with a work where nothing's just or fit ; 
One glaring chaos and wild heap of wit. 
Poets, like painters, thus unskill'd to trace 
The naked nature and the living grace, 
With gold and jewels cover ev'ry part, 
And hide with ornaments their want of art. 

Others for language all their care express 

And value books, as women men, for dress : 

Their praise is still, — the style is excellent ; 

The sense they humbly take upon content. 

Words are like leaves ; and where they most abound, 

Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found." 

And after Pope we do not have much wit. There is 
nothing better than the coarse vigor of Churchill and 
the ribald buffoonery of Wolcot (Peter Pindar). 

I don't think we can say that the eighteenth century 
failed in poetry because the energies of its verse-makers 
were directed to rhetorical brilliancy. Hayley and 
Mason and Darwin, the leading poets in the boyhood of 



ALLEGED MONOTONY OP HEROIC COUPLETS 43 

Wordsworth and Coleridge and Scott, were not rhetori- 
cally brilliant ; their rhetoric was ineffective ; they 
were simply dull ; and we can hardly say that they 
failed as poets because they tried to be rhetoricians. 
They would probably have been dull in any case. 

Another way of accounting for the eighteenth-cen- 
tury barrenness is to ascribe it to the monotony of the 
versification. Macaulay speaks as if every aspiring 
poet thought couplets the only permissible form. Pope 
used onty the couplet, and, it is often said, brought it 
to such mechanical perfection that any versifier after 
him could turn out smooth, and finished, and melodious 
couplets with as much ease as a machine cuts wood 
into blocks of a given size. Pope imposed restrictions 
upon himself ; such as that each couplet must end with 
a break in the sense, that an extra syllable must be 
admitted only in one place, and that the metrical pauses 
must fall only in certain places. The eighteenth-cen- 
tury poets followed him till the world became weary 
of heroic couplets. 

This theory also will not bear examination. Couplets 
are not necessarily monotonous ; witness Chaucer's 
"Knight's Tale," Marlowe's "Hero and Leander," 
Keats's "Endymion," Swinburne's "Tristram and 
Iseult." Monotony in the case of the couplet does not 
arise from the poet putting himself under strict con- 
ditions. We do not find Pope's couplets monotonous, 
if we are interested in the subject. He leaves himself 
room enough for variety within his limits. 

The poems of Hoole, and Hayley, and Mickle, and 
Mason, and Darwin are monotonous in rhythm, not 
because they wrote couplets, but because they wrote 
bad couplets, and would have been equally monotonous 
if they had written in any other stanza. No doubt 
writing in a strictly fettered rhythm imposes a greater 
strain upon the poet ; but if he has power to stir our 
feelings profoundly, the regularity of the rhythm, keep- 



44 pope 

ing the passion of his theme within hounds, gives him 
a stronger hold upon lis. If there is no intense life in 
what he has to say to us, there is of course nothing to 
moderate ; and he will not interest us any the more 
whatever gymnastic feats he performs in the way of 
rhythm, any more than a musician can hold us spell- 
hound by flourishes from top to bottom of the scale. 

Besides, the eighteenth century poets did not, as a 
matter of fact, enslave themselves to the couplet as the 
only permissible form. 

It was not slavish submission to the ancients, nor to 
the heroic couplet, nor to the demand for rhetorical 
brilliancy, that kept so much of the poetry at a low 
level. We are only scratching on the surface of an 
explanation when we adopt any such theory. Nor will 
it do to say that the eighteenth-century was an age of 
prose ; that its mission was to form the prose style of 
English literature. We wish to know why it was an 
age of prose — why it adopted this mission. Nor will it 
do to say that it held a false theory of poetic diction. 
We wish to get at the feeling that made them satisfied 
with their conventional diction as the light thing. 

We must look away from such details if we are to 
understand the eighteenth century, and look at poetic 
productions as wholes. Take the works of the leaders 
of the great poetic revival of this century — Words- 
worth, Scott, Byron. In what broad respects do they 
differ from all the works of the eighteenth century? 
The form of their poems, in a large sense of the word, 
is new, and their vein of feeling is new. They treat 
new themes in a new way, and with a new spirit. 
Above all, they give serious expression to their own 
personal emotions. Consider the new form of the "Lay 
of the Last Minstrel," the first genuinely popular poem, 
interesting to all classes, between the time of Queen 
Anne and the nineteenth century — a metrical romance 
regularly constructed, with perfect unity of action, 



DEFECTS OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY 45 

incidents all helping forward the progress of the story 
through various complications to a denouement. No 
such poem had ever been written before ; it was a new 
form in poetry — classical regularity of form, combined 
with romantic freedom of incident. Then the spirit of 
the poem — the serious epic treatment of the necromanc- 
ing lady of Branksome Hall, the Goblin page, the 
wizard, and the bold moss-trooper. We have nothing 
like this in the eighteenth century. In Pope's time such 
personages would either have been burlesqued or treated 
with affected respect, such as a grown-up person would 
use toward fairies and hobgoblins in telling stories 
about them to a child. Taken as a whole, in form and 
spirit, the " Lay " was a new thing in literature. The 
same may be said of " Childe Harold." Here also we 
find a new kind of epic, such as the general writers on 
epic poetry had never contemplated, the hero of which 
is not a mythical king like Prince Arthur, or a per- 
sonified virtue moving in Faeiyland like Spenser's Red 
Cross Knight, or Guyon, or Britomart, but a modern 
man moving in modern scenes. Wordsworth also is 
new in form as well as in spirit. No poet before him 
had dared to shut himself up in the country and choose, 
as the subject of his verse, his own personal emotions and 
reflections as aroused by the moving spectacle of sky 
and mountain and glen, and the homely life of ordinary 
rustics. He wrote a kind of pastoral poetry that had 
not been legislated for by the technical lawgivers of 
the art. 

The serious expression in new forms of intense and 
generous personal emotion is a broad characteristic of 
the nineteenth-century revival. Now we can under- 
stand why the poets of the eighteenth century failed in 
the artistic expression of serious and generous feeling. 
The main defects of their poetry can be traced to one 
source — the character of the audience for whose judg- 
ment they had respect, by whose ideals they were con- 



46 pope 

trolled, who were to them the arbiters of taste. The 
standard of taste in the time of Queen Anne, and till 
near the end of the century, was a self-consciously aris- 
tocratic and refined society, self-conscious of their 
superior manners and superior culture, and disposed to 
treat the ways of the vulgar with amused contempt. 
This, I think, can be shown to be at the root of the striv- 
ing after wit and the respect for established models, 
and the false theory of poetic diction in serious poetry. 
Fear of being vulgar, fear of being singular — these 
were the real nightmares that sat upon eighteenth- 
century poetry. 






CHAPTER IV 
pope — continued 

INFLUENCE OF IDEAS ON POETRY — SPIRIT OF THE AGE — INFLU- 
ENCE OF SOCIETY ON POPE — GAY'S BALLADS 

I am not sure that you all followed what I said in my 
last lecture about the influences that formed the poetic 
ideals of the eighteenth century. By the poetic ideals 
of a generation I mean the ideas prevalent among those 
interested in poetry as to what poetry should be — the 
sentiments that they wish to find in poetry, the intel- 
lectual, or moral, or emotional cravings for which they 
seek satisfaction in poetry. But, you may ask, How 
can tli is be said to make poetry ? Is it not the poet who 
makes the poetry ? Yes ; but he makes it in harmony 
with — or, if he is a defiant man, in antagonism to — the 
poetic ideals of the men with whom he mixes and for 
whom he writes. You have heard of the spirit of the 
age — an intangible something that sets its mark upon 
all the works of a generation of men : their books, their 
architecture, their dress, their commercial enterprises, 
their institutions. What I mean by the poetic ideal is 
the working of this spirit upon poetry. I am inclined 
to think myself that people sometimes speak of this 
spirit of the age in too unqualified terms, as if every 
thing came under its influence. Now, many things 
escape its influence, as you recognize when you speak 
of things or persons being behind the age ; it is only 
the most distinctive products of the age that feel its 
shaping, its generative force. And besides, there may 
be more than one spirit in a generation, each with its 
own range of influence, handed down, it may be, from 

47 



48 pope 

past times, and kept alive by sympathy with them, or 
engendered by the peculiar circumstances of the circle 
of people whom it pervades. Go into churches of 
widely different sects, for example, and you seem to 
breathe different atmospheres — a different spirit per- 
vades them ; the " full force and joint result " of orna- 
ment and ritual and sermon is somehow different. You 
might find it hard, if you fixed on details, to say where 
the difference lies ; the same sermon that is preached in 
one might have been preached in the other ; the same 
hymns might have been sung ; yet we feel under the 
influence of a different spirit. And further, these various 
churches have probably less in common with each other, 
though they mix in the same age, than they have with 
the churches of past ages, each of them perpetuating a 
traditional spirit of its own, and perhaps making it a 
point of honor to keep that unchanged. 

The same holds in poetiy. A poet writes under the 
influence of a- certain spirit, a certain social medium, 
which shapes and colors what he writes. To discover 
this we must look not only at the general character 
of his age, but also at the character of his immediate 
audience, of the circle in which he moves. We must 
study lus relations with them, whether they are rela- 
tions of harmony, as in the case of Pope, or relations of 
antagonism, as in the case of Byron. And we can't 
expect to get at this subtle spirit by studying isolated 
details, and arguing about them. My object in last 
lecture was to impress this fact upon you in the case of 
eighteenth-century poetry. There is a something in the 
spirit of eighteenth-century poetry which the critics of 
this century, broadly speaking, do not like. They com- 
plain that the eighteenth century is barren of true 
poetry. And they often set to work to account for 
this by fastening on details of form, and diction, and 
imagery, and metre. Some say the barrenness is due to 
subservience to ancient rules, others to an exclusive am- 



INFLUENCE OF SOCIETY ON POETRY 49 

bition after witty expression, others to a slavish, attach- 
ment to one kind of metre. 

Now, in the first place, I think they exaggerate the 
barrenness of the century. It is often spoken of as if 
there were no good poetry then, whereas it was only com- 
paratively deficient in certain kinds. And, in the second 
place, we do not satisfactorily account for the deficiency 
in certain kinds if we look at details by themselves. We 
must look at them in connection with the spirit of the 
society for which Pope wrote. The spirit of this society 
accounts not only for much that was in Pope's poetry, 
but also for much that was in the two following genera- 
tions, because the traditions of this society were main- 
tained after Pope's time, its spirit was transmitted as 
the dominant spirit in literature till the end of the cen- 
tury. There were revolts against it in the poetry of 
Thomson and Dyer, and Gray and Collins, and Burns 
and Cowper, but, on the whole, it maintained its hold. 
Its supremacy was not, indeed, shaken till Wordsworth 
and Byron raised the standard of rebellion, and the 
majority at once in fact, and gradually in open avowal, 
went over to them. 

The society that imposed the laws of taste in poetry 
in Pope's time was, as I said, an aristocratic society, 
self-consciously so, as it could hardly fail to be when 
high and low, rich and poor, were marked off from each 
other by such conspicuous differences of dress and 
manners as they moved about in their daily life. It 
was not only self-consciously but superciliously aristo- 
cratic. Sympathy with the simple feelings of unfashion- 
able folk was rare in those days. Now, in such a society 
one ruling motive — except, of course, among persons of 
natural hardihood or assured position in it — is fear of 
vulgarity, resulting in a disposition to treat as vulgar 
whatever is done by people outside the pale of fashion. 
Many details might be urged against this view, but I think 
it must be allowed that this is a very prevalent motive. 
4 



50 pope 

Let us see, then, how this prevalent motive would 
operate on poetry, supposing the poet to be under its 
influence. It would affect both his choice of subjects 
and his manner of treating them. Nature, Pope said, 
is " at once the source and test of art." But Nature is 
a vague terra, which each person interprets as meaning 
his own nature, and that must always be interpenetrated 
by the spirit of a man's social surroundings, the spirit 
prevalent among his companions. The Nature from 
which Pope chose his themes was either human nature 
as he saw it in fashionable society, or human nature so 
treated as not to offend their susceptibilities. Pope's 
conception of Nature did not lead him to go, like 
Wordsworth, to simple country-people for his subjects, 
and for his diction to "the natural language of man 
in a state of intense emotion." " True wit," he said, — 
by wit meaning poetic expression, — is "Nature to 
advantage dressed." This casual metaphor in the 
" Essay on Criticism " takes us nearer to the centre 
of Pope's ideal of poetic expression, which was also 
the ideal of his age, than any other single passage in 
his writings. 

Let us take an example of what a refined contemporary 
of his, writing in the Guardian about Philips's 
"Pastorals," considered the dressing of Nature to 
advantage: 

" I will yet add another mark, which may be observed 
very often in the above-named poets, which is agreeable 
to the character of shepherds, and nearly allied to super- 
stition: I mean the use of proverbial sayings. I take 
the common similitudes in pastoral to be of the pro- 
verbial order, which are so frequent that it is needless 
and would be tiresome to quote them. I shall only 
take notice upon this head, that it is a nice piece of art 
to raise a proverb above the vulgar style, and still keep 
it easy and unaffected. Thus the old wish, ' God rest 
his soul,' is finely turned : 



POETICAL BATHOS 51 

" 'Then gentle Sidney liv'd, the shepherd's friend, 
Eternal blessings on his shade attend.' " 

So easy a metamorphosis as this Pope would have 
despised, for the poetic dress of nature is esteemed 
according to the poet's originality and ingenuity in con- 
structing it. Pope, on the contrary, would have required 
such an expression as only a man of genius could devise 
after much toil. In a " Treatise on the Art of Sinking 
in Poetry," — one of the miscellanies published conjointly 
by Pope, Swift, and Arbuthnot, — you will find that Pope 
ridicules simple expressions and the raising of language 
above the vulgar style, enforcing his opinion by speci- 
mens of bathos culled from the poets of the time ; e.g. : 
" Who knocks at the door ? " becomes when raised 
above the vulgar: 

" For whom thus rudely pleads my loud-tongued gate, 
That he may enter ? " 

or Theobald's elevation of " Open the letter " into the 
sounding line, " Wax ! render up thy trust." 

If you look at Pope's poetry closely, j t ou find that 
though lie avoided easy elevations he did think it neces- 
sary to use language which now seems affected and 
insincere. In this } r ou see him influenced by the spirit 
of his age. In his " Messiah," published in the Spec- 
tator (May 14, 1712), and considered by critics of the 
time to be a very fine poem and an improvement on 
Isaiah, whose prophecy we think grand in its simplicity, 
Ave clearly see this influence at work. For example, in 
Isaiah (xli. 19) we have : " I will set in the desert the fir- 
tree, and the pine, and the box-tree together," while 
Pope describes the change as follows : 

" Waste, sandy valleys, once perplex'd with thorn, 
The spicy fir and shapely box adorn." 

For Isaiah's phrase " the suckling child " Pope has got 
" the smiling infant," and the whole poem is full of 



52 POPE 

similar examples. So, too, we find many examples of 
bad taste in his translation of Homer, for Pope con- 
sidered it necessaiy through the whole of that work to 
dress Homer to advantage for the fashionable society of 
Queen Anne's time. 

That society would have ridiculed Achilles weeping 
by the side of Thetis, and accordingly Pope " elevates " 
the passage thus : 

" Far in the deep recesses of the main, 
Where aged Ocean holds his watery reign, 
The goddess-mother heard. The waves divide ; 
And, like a mist, she rose ahove the tide : 
Beheld him mourning on the naked shores ; 
And thus the sorrows of his soul explores." 

Pope has not rendered the touching simplicity which 
Homer achieves without infringing, to our modern 
ideas, on the dignity of his heroic characters. In the 
case of minor poets of the time this elevation of diction 
is not always achieved with the same taste that Pope — 
master of language — showed. In the translation of the 
"Odyssey," in which Pope was assisted by two coadju- 
tors, the magnifying of the incidents is less skilfully 
managed and the affectation becomes more apparent. 
We may cite for this purpose that passage in the sixth 
book of the " Odyssey " where Odysseus discovers 
Nausicaa and her maidens at the stream. The affec- 
tation in the poetical translation is apparent when we 
compare it with the prose version by Butcher and Lang : 
" Then they took the garments from the wain in their 
hands, and bore them to the black water, and briskly 
trod them down in the trenches, in busy rival ly. Now 
when they had washed and cleansed all the stains, they 
spread all out in order along the shore of the deep, even 
where the sea, in beating on the coast, washed the 
pebbles clean. Then, having bathed, and anointed them 
well with olive oil, they took their mid-day meal on the 



PROSE AND POETICAL TRANSLATIONS COMPARED 53 

river's banks, waiting till the clothes should dry in the 
brightness of the sun. Anon, when they were satisfied 
with food, the maidens and the princess, they fell to 
playing at ball, casting away their tires, and anion «• 
them Nausicaa of the white arms began the song." 
Very different this from the grandiloquent version by 
Brome, which Pope approved by using it as his own : 

" Then emulous, the royal robes they lave, 
And plunge the vestures in the cleansing wave 
(The vestures cleans'd, o'erspread the shelly sand. 
Their snowy lustre whitens all the strand !) 
Then with a short repast relieve their toil, 
And o'er their limbs diffuse ambrosial oil ; 
And while the robes imbibe the solar ray, 
O'er the green mead the sporting virgins play 
(Their shining veils unbound). Along the skies, 
Toss'd, and retoss'd, the ball incessant flies, 
They sport, they feast ; Nausicaa lifts her voice, 
And, warbling sweet, makes earth and heaven rejoice." 

With the primitive enjo3 r ment described by Homer 
the poet did not evidently sympathize. The character 
either of the poet or of his audience was at fault : 
either the poet was insensible to the charms of such 
passages, or his audience would have considered them 
coarse. When the Queen Anne poets wrote for the 
stage, — which must appeal to the sympathies of a wide 
circle, — and not for fashionable society, you find that 
the art of simple writing was not lost. Half consciously 
the poets wrote differently for different audiences. 
True, Addison's " Cato " is a splendid example of the 
stilted style of the period, but there are here and there 
decided exceptions. 

Gay's songs, in plays addressed, as plays must be to 
succeed, to a wider circle than the fashionable society 
of the time, show that the art of simple writing was not 
lost. In " 'Twas when the seas were roaring " (from 



54 POPE 

"What d'ye Call It," 1715), and in "Black-eyed 
Susan," occur such lines as these : 

" Cease, cease, thou cruel ocean, 
And let my lover rest. 
Ah, what's thy troubled motion, 
To that within my breast ? " 

" So the sweet lark, high poised in air, 
Shuts close his pinions to his breast 
(If chance his mate's shrill cry he hear), 
And drops at once into her nest." 

Gay had more of a gift for simple, fluent, easy, melo- 
dious song than any of his contemporaries. Yet, even 
in these, there is a touch of burlesque, an accent of 
insincerity, in the poet's assumed sympathy with the 
simple feelings of simple folk. In his " Pastorals " 
Gay made broad fun out of the superstitious igno- 
rance and coarse sentiments of rustics : he had no 
eye, as Wordsworth had, for the higher modes of feel- 
ing ; he saw only the rude defects incident to the hard- 
ness and narrowness of their lives, and these amused 
him. They amused fashionable people, and Gaj^, a fat, 
good-natured, simple-hearted man, petted and caressed 
and pensioned by great people all through his literary 
life, quite fell in with their humor. 

There is one kind of poetry, mock-heroic or heroic- 
comical, for which the elevated Queen Anne style is 
peculiarly suited — in which its affectation and insin- 
cerity are not felt as faults, because affectation and 
insincerity are part of the humor in which the poet 
writes. Pope's poetic diction is seen in one of its 
happiest applications in the "Rape of the Lock," where 
trivial incidents, and little anxieties and interests, and 
pretty frivolities are purposely treated as matters of 
vast moment. Here, also, he found a theme well within 
the interests of his audience. I presume that you have 



m. taine's criticism of pope 55 

all read this charming poem, and have learned from 
your edition of it how it originated in a young lord's 
cutting off a lock of a lady's hair ; how this led to a 
coolness between the two families ; how Pope was 
asked -to write a poem on the subject to smooth over 
the quarrel ; how the poem appeared in 1712, and was 
expanded before 1714 to the form in which we have it. 
It is a different sort of theme from the technical essays, 
and the translations and imitations of Virgil and Ovid 
and Chaucer, in which Pope had hitherto exerted him- 
self — a theme directly suggested by the fashionable life 
of the time, by human nature as it lived and moved in 
the society of Queen Anne's days. Pope had a model 
in Boileau's " Lutrin," a model as regarded the form, 
but the subject was fresh and new ; it came to him from 
breathing life, and was not laboriously sought. 

Pope has been charged with gross impoliteness in 
writing such a poem ; indeed, M. Taine found in it a 
coarseness akin to Swift's. "Pope," wrote M. Taine, 
" dedicates his poem to Mrs. Arabella Fermor with 
every kind of compliment. The truth is he is not 
polite ; a Frenchwoman would have sent him back his 
book, and advised him to learn manners ; for one com- 
mendation of her beauty she would find ten sarcasms 
upon her frivolity. . . In England it was not found 
too rude. Mrs. Arabella Fermor was so pleased with 
the poem that she gave away copies of it. . . But 
the strangest thing is that this trifling is, for Frenchmen 
at least, no badinage at all. It is not at all like light- 
ness or gayety. Dorat, Gresset, would have been stupe- 
fied and shocked by it. We remain cold under its most 
brilliant hits. Now and then at most a crack of the 
whip arouses us, but not to laughter. These caricatures 
seem strange to us, but do not amuse. The wit is no 
wit : all is calculated, combined, artificially prepared ; 
we expect flashes of lightning, but at the last moment 
they do not descend. . . We say to ourselves now 



56 pope 

that we are in China : that so far from Paris and Vol- 
taire we must be surprised at nothing ; that these folks 
have ears different from ours ; and that a Pekin manda- 
rin vastly relishes kettle-music. Finall} r , we compre- 
hend that, even in this correct age and this artificial 
poetry, the old style of imagination exists ; that it is 
nourished, as before, by oddities and contrasts ; and 
that taste, in spite of all culture, will never become 
acclimatized ; that incongruities, far from shocking, 
delight it ; that it is insensible to French sweetness and 
refinements ; that it needs a succession of expressive 
figures, unexpected and grinning, to pass before it ; that 
it prefers this coarse carnival to delicate insinuations ; 
that Pope belongs to his country, in spite of his classical 
polish and his studied elegancies ; and that his unpleas- 
ant and vigorous fancy is akin to that of Swift." 

This poem, which English critics of all schools agree 
in praising as a masterpiece of light, airy, gay extrava- 
gance, — marum sal, as Addison called it, — strikes M. 
Taine as a piece of harsh, scornful, indelicate buffoonery. 
For him it is a mere succession of oddities and contrasts, 
of expressive figures, unexpected and grinning — an 
example of English insensibility to French sweetness 
and refinement. What especially offends his delicate 
sense is the bearishness of Pope's laughter at an elegant 
and beautiful woman of fashion. Pope describes with 
a grin on his face all the particulars of the elaborate 
toilet with which Belinda prepared her beauty for con- 
quest, and all the artificial airs and graces with which 
she sought to bewitch the heart of susceptible man. 
The Frenchman listens without sympathy, without ap- 
preciation, with the contemptuous wonder of a well- 
bred man at clownish buffoonery. He sees nothing to 
laugh at in a woman spending three hours over her 
toilet. Is she not preparing a beautiful picture for him ? 
She cannot do this without powders and washes and 
paint-pots. What is there to laugh at in this ? It is a 



m. taine's criticism of pope 57 

mere matter of fact. The entire surrender of the female 
heart to little artifices for little ends does not strike him 
as ludicrous. His delight in the finished picture, the 
elegant, graceful, captivating woman, hallows every 
ingredient used in the making of it. It is not polite to 
laugfh at a woman. 



CHAPTER V 

A GROUP OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETS 

THOMSON — EARLY LIFE — DESCRIPTIVE POETRY GENERALLY— 
' WINTER" — THOMSON'S POSITION IN POETRY — DYER AND 
SOMERVILLE 

Between the end of Pope's second period and the 
beginning of his third a new poet appeared, of a very- 
different vein. 

It was in the last year of the reign of George I. that 
this fresh and powerful voice made itself heard in 
literature. A respectable clergyman of literary tastes, 
Mr. Whatley, chanced to take up a volume of poems 
lying on the counter of Millan the publisher. The 
poems had been published for some weeks, but had 
attracted no attention. As he turned over the leaves 
Mr. Whatley's attention was roused ; before he laid the 
book down attention had developed into enthusiasm, and 
he rushed off to the coffee-houses to proclaim the dis- 
covery of a new poet. 

The new poet was James Thomson, a young man of 
twenty-six, just as old as the century, who had been 
born and bred in very different circumstances from 
Pope, and whose poetry consequently derived its tone 
from very different influences. Consider the life of 
Thomson up to the time when " Winter," the first of his 
poems on the " Seasons," was published in 1726, and you 
will see that a very different strain was to be expected 
from him. His father was a minister in the Scotch Low- 
lands — minister of the parish of Southdean in Rox- 
burghshire. The extraordinary death of this gentleman, 
when his son was in his eighteenth year, is significant 

58 



Thomson's early years 59 

both of the superstitious atmosphere in which the poet 
was educated, and of the sensitiveness of the organiza- 
tion that he inherited. There was a ghost in the parish 
of Southdean, and the minister was sent for to lay it ; 
but no sooner had he begun his exorcism than it seemed 
to him that he Avas struck on the head witli a ball of fire, 
and he never recovered from the shock. A man of such 
susceptibility and overpowering vividness of imagination 
was fitting father to a poet. He had literary neighbors 
also, like Pope's father, who encouraged his boy in verse- 
making. There was Mr. Riccarton, minister of the 
neighboring parish of Ilobkirk, who wrote a poem on 
Winter, and is shown by that fact to have been likely to 
give the author of the " Seasons " an early bias toward 
the vein of sentiment and reflection that afterward took 
possession of him. A neighboring laird, Sir TV. Bennet 
of Chesters, also took notice of the school-boy, invited 
him to spend his summer holidays at his house, and, being 
himself an amateur of poetry, encouraged him to com- 
pose verses. Thomson's juvenile verses must have been 
very clumsy compared with Pope's. We have a speci- 
men of them, published in the Edinburgh Miscellany in 
his twentieth year, when he had completed his course of 
studies in Arts in the University of Edinburgh, in which, 
while the language is rough, there is a certain force and 
freshness of vision, an air of sincere delight in country 
scenes, evidences of unaffected, loving observations of 
country sports. There is a story told of Thomson's 
unwillingness to leave Tweedside for the University. 
He was sent to Edinburgh on horseback with a servant, 
but was back before the servant, saying he could study 
as well on the braes of Sou'dean as in Edinburgh. 

To Edinburgh, however, Thomson had to go, and the 
whole family removed there on the father's sudden 
death. He was a student in Divinity till 1724, and in 
October of that year was severely reproved by the Pro- 
fessor for the exuberance of his imagination in an 



60 A GEO UP OP EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETS 

exercise lecture on the 119tli Psalm. In March, 1725, 
armed with introductions from an aristocratic friend of 
his mother's, the Lady Grizel Baillie, he went in quest of 
Fortune to London, where a college friend of his, David 
Mallet, was already settled as tutor in the family of the 
Duke of Montrose. Thomson also obtained a tutor- 
ship, — in the family of Lord Binning, son-in-law of his 
Edinburgh patroness, — but held it only for a few months. 
It seems to have been in the neighborhood of Lord 
Binning's house at Barnet that the idea of writing a 
poem on Winter first took shape in Thomson's mind. 
The approach of winter in 1725 found him in circum- 
stances in which he needed all the consolations of a 
warm imagination. His mother had died a few weeks 
after he parted from her at Leith, and he was himself 
in pecuniary straits, with but little prospect of realizing 
the hopes with which he had come to the capital. Read 
the opening lines of "Winter" with this knowledge of 
the poet's circumstances, and you will see how natural 
it was that such thoughts should come into his mind as 
he walked to and from his country lodging, with eyes 
that had long been accustomed to watch changes in the 
sky and on the face of the earth — turning to them now 
for relief from his own cheerless looking future. Very 
different this from the situation of the artist Pope, for 
whom poetry was not a consolation for desperate cir- 
cumstances, but a business pursued with ease and de- 
liberation. 

" See, Winter comes, to rule the varied year, 
Sullen and sad, with all his rising train ; 
Vapors, and clouds, and storms. Be these my theme. 
These ! that exalt the soul to solemn thought 
And heavenly musing. Welcome, kindred glooms, 
Congenial horrors, hail ! with frequent foot, 
Pleased have I, in my cheerful morn of life, 
When nursed by careless Solitude I lived 
And sung of Nature with unceasing joy, 
Pleased have I wander'd through your rough domain ; 



Thomson's motive in writing " winter " 61 

Trod the pure virgin-snows, myself as pure ; 
Heard the winds roar, and the big torrent burst ; 
Or seen the deep-fermenting tempest brew'd 
In the grim evening sky. Thus pass'd the time 
Till through the lucid chambers of the south 
Look'd out the joyous Spring, look'd out and smiled." 

Descriptive poetry, it seems to me, — i, e., poetry- 
descriptive of inanimate nature, — must always be more 
or less dull unless we have some clue to the mood of the 
poet. The description then lives for us as an expres- 
sion of the writer's ruling emotion ; it acquires human 
interest. Of course the human interest of Thomson's 
descriptions is not always due to the colors thrown 
upon them by his own hopes and fears for himself ; it is 
only passages here and there that have a direct bio- 
graphical interest. The gloomy notes of the opening 
of his poem on Winter are only significant of the mood 
in which he began the poem ; once fairly absorbed in 
his subject, he seems, as it were, to have been carried on 
the wings of imagination far above and away from 
the anxieties of his own life, up into sublime contem- 
plation of the great forces of Nature, and into warm 
sympathy with the human hardships and enjoyments, 
horrors and amusements, peculiar to the season. When 
Thomson is called a descriptive poet, it must be remem- 
bered that he not merely describes Nature with the 
minute fidelity of a landscape painter ; it is alwa} r s 
Nature in its relation to man ; the ways and the feelings 
of man have even greater interest for him than the 
changing appearances of sky and earth and sea. The 
secret of his extraordinary popularity is that he 
describes in sonorous and dignified verse not only what 
all men must see as long as the seasons endure, but also 
what all men must feel as long as they are affected by 
the changes of the seasons, and have hearts to feel for 
one another's joys and pains. 

The poem of " Winter," published in the spring of 



62 A GROUP OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETS 

1726, leaped at once into popularity. Two editions were 
exhausted in a few months. The freshness of the poem 
must have helped it greatly with the fastidious coffee- 
house critics of the time. Nobody since Milton had 
handled blank verse with such power. The subject 
also was fresh ; no poet since Milton had lighted on 
such a theme for sublimity of imagination and breadth 
of human interest. It came to Thomson quite spon- 
taneously ; from his own hardships to the general hard- 
ships of all living things in winter, and the efforts of 
man to make the most of the gloomy season, was a 
natural transition ; and, coming to him as a happy 
thought, the subject was treated with genuine enthu- 
siasm. And if we look at the general structure of 
the poem, we see another thing that must have struck 
the critics of the time as a novelty. It was an innova- 
tion upon the classical structure. It does not follow 
any predetermined scheme or plan, beyond beginning 
with the storms of early winter, and ending with the 
thaw that heralds the approach of spring. The poet 
leaves himself free to digress wherever casual associa- 
tions may lead him. 

The best way of giving an idea of Thomson's method 
and style will be to follow the course of this his first, 
freshest, and most powerful poem. He begins, as I have 
said, after a short introduction, with a description of the 
black skies, heavy rains, and floods of early winter : 

" Then comes the father of the tempest forth, 
Wrapt in black glooms. First joyless rains obscure 
Drive through the mingling skies with vapour foul ; 
Dash on the mountain's brow, and shake the woods, 
That grumbling wave below. The unsightly plain 
Lies a brown deluge ; as the low-bent clouds 
Pour flood on flood, yet unexhausted still 
Combine, and deepening into night, shut up 
The day's fair face. . . 

Wide o'er the brim, with many a torrent swelled, 
And the mix'd ruin of its banks o'erspread, 



THOMSON S METHOD AND STYLE 63 

At last the roused-up river pours along : 

Resistless, roaring, dreadful, down it comes 

From the rude mountain, and the mossy wild, 

Tumbling through rocks abrupt, and sounding far ; 

Then o'er the sanded valley floating spreads, 

Calm, sluggish, silent ; till again, constrained 

Between two meeting hills, it bursts away, 

When rocks and woods o'erhang the turbid stream ; 

There gathering triple force, rapid and deep, 

It boils, and wheels, and foams, aud thunders through." 

Then follows the description of a storm, preceded by 
an invocation to the winds, in the style of personification 
now obsolete. It is obsolete ; not so the description of 
the storm itself. There is a real picture before his 
mind's eye as he describes ; and he is intent above every 
thing in bodying forth this picture to his reader. 
Heightening the effect at the end by the addition of 
superstitious horrors may be said to be conventional : 

" Ye too, ye winds ! that now begin to blow 
With boisterous sweep, I raise my voice to you. 
Where are your stores, ye powerful beings ! say, 
Where your aerial magazines reserved, 
To swell the brooding terrors of the storm ? 
In what far distant region of the sky, 
Hush'd in deep silence, sleep you when 'tis calm ? 

. . . Red fiery streaks 
Begin to flush around. The reeling clouds 
Stagger with dizzy poise, as doubting yet 
Which master to obey ; while rising slow. 
Blank, in the leaden-colour'd east, the moon 
Wears a wan circle round her blunted horns. 

. . . The cormorant on high 
Wheels from the deep, and screams along the land. 
Loud shrieks the soaring hern ; and with wild wing 
The circling sea-fowl cleave the flaky clouds. 

Meanwhile, the mountain billows, to the clouds 
In dreadful tumult swell'd, surge above surge 
Burst into chaos with tremendous roar, 
And anchored navies from their station drive, 



64 A GROUP OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETS 

Wild as the winds across the howling waste 

Of mighty waters. . . 

The whirling tempest raves along the plain ; 

And on the cottage thatch'd, or lordly roof, 

Keen-fastening, shakes them to the solid base. 

Sleep frighted flies ; and round the rocking dome, 

For entrance eager, howls the savage blast. 

Then too, they say, through all the burdened air, 

Long groans are heard, shrill sounds, and distant sighs 

That utter'd by the demon of the night, 

Warn the devoted wretch of woe and death." 

Then lie imagines the storm to subside at midnight, 
and gives his midnight reflections : 

" Nature's king, who oft 
Amid tempestuous darkness dwells alone, 
And on the wings of the careering wind 
Walks dreadfully serene, commands a calm ; 
Then straight, air, sea, and earth, are hush'd at once. 

Now, while the drowsy world lies lost in sleep, 
Let me associate with the serious Night, 
And Contemplation, her sedate compeer ; 
Let me shake off the intrusive cares of day, 
And lay the meddling senses all aside." 

Next comes his famous description of a snow-storm, 
followed by his touching narrative of the shepherd lost 
in the snow : 

" As thus the snows arise ; and foul, and fierce, 
All Winter drives along the darken'd air ; 
In his own loose-revolving fields the swain 
Disaster'd stands ; sees other hills ascend, 
Of unknown, joyless brow ; and other scenes 
Of horrid prospect shag the trackless plain. 
Nor finds the river, nor the forest, hid 
Beneath the formless wild ; but wanders on 
From hill to dale, still more and more astray ; 
Impatient flouncing through the drifted heaps, 
Stung with the thoughts of home ; the thoughts of home 
Rush on his nerves, and call their vigour forth 
In many a vain attempt. 



DESCRIPTION OF A SNOW-STORM 65 

. . . Down he sinks 
Beneath the shelter of the shapeless drift, 
Thinking o'er all the bitterness of death, 
Mixed with the tender anguish Nature shoots 
Through the wrung bosom of the dying man ; 
His wife, his children, and his friends unseen. 
In vain for him the officious wife prepares 
The fire fair blazing and the vestment warm ; 
In vain his little children, peeping out 
Into the mingling storm, demand their sire 
With tears of artless innocence. Alas ! 
Nor wife, nor children, more shall he behold, 
Nor friends, nor sacred home. On every nerve 
The deadly Winter seizes ; shuts up sense ; 
And, o'er his inmost vitals creeping cold, 
Lays him along the snows, a stiffened corse, 
Stretched out, and bleaching in the northern blast. 

And here can I forget the generous band, 

Who, touched with human woe, redressive searched 

Into the horrors of the gloomy jail ? 

Ye sons of Mercy ! yet resume the search ; 
Drag forth the legal monsters into light, 
Wrench from their hands Oppression's iron rod, 
And bid the cruel feel the pains they give." 

The thought of this pathetic incident leads him to 
reflect on the broad contrast between rich and poor ; 
and there next appears in his poem the first notable 
reference in our literature to the great humanitarian 
movement for reforming the horrors of prison life, with 
which the name of Howard is associated. Winter 
scenes at home lead to winter scenes on the Alps, on the 
Pyrenees and the Apennines, and he draws a thrill- 
ing picture of the bands of wolves that prowl over 
the snowy wastes. Then he passes to his own ideal 
of enjoyment in winter, in a retreat 

"Between the groaning forest and the shore," 

with chosen books and chosen friends. Next he takes 

up winter enjoyments in the village and in the city, 

5 . 



66 A GKOUP OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETS 

pausing by the way to denounce gaming, and eulogize 
Lord Chesterfield. From this he returns to a descrip- 
tion of Nature under frost, and games on the ice ; this 
leads him to winter in the Arctic regions, the life of the 
Laplanders, the fate of Sir Hugh Willoughby the Arctic 
explorer, and the romantic career of Peter the Great. 
Then follows the thaw, and the concluding reflections 
on human destiny. 

The best of Thomson's "Seasons" is undoubtedly 
" Winter," though " Autumn " probably surpasses it in 
technical skill. He wrote more slowly and laboriously 
after his first success ; and there are more frequent 
traces in his other seasons of deliberate imitation of 
Virgil's " Georgics," and deliberate search for good 
descriptive topics. " Summer," the longest, appeared 
in 1727 ; " Spring " in 1728 ; and " Autumn " in 1730. 
The " Seasons," as now printed, contain many later 
revisions and additions, in some of which he had the 
assistance of Pope. 

The best way to read these poems is not to read them 
through ; but to take the argument and pick out anj^ 
theme that strikes you as interesting. You will thus 
best appreciate the " bold description and the manly 
thought " to which the poet laid claim. Avoid 
" Spring," and his tedious description of the golden age, 
and the influence of the season on birds and beasts, and 
fishes and men. 

Between 1730 and 1748 Thomson produced little 
worthy of remembrance. His song " Rule Britannia" 
appeared in 1740, in a mask of "Alfred," written by 
him in conjunction with David Mallet. The " Castle 
of Indolence " was published in the last year of his 
life. 

The " Seasons " remained Thomson's great achieve- 
ment. It was a striking but not inexplicable fact that 
contact with London literary society, to which he was 
at once admitted on the success of " Winter," paralyzed 



INFLUENCE OF LONDON LITERARY SOCIETY 67 

his poetic faculty, or at best robbed it of half its strength. 
He had written with comparatively unconscious freedom 
before, with the victorious joy of reaching and even sur- 
passing his brightest ideals of poetic achievement ; con- 
tact with a more critical societ}', and more exacting 
standards of literary finish, seems to have bred self-dis- 
trust. In compliance with the taste of his new com- 
panions, he became more ambitious of displaying his 
learning, and chose topics in which it was easier than 
in the description of the " Seasons " to show an acquaint- 
ance with history and political philosophy. He used his 
metrical power also in the service of politics. His first 
political venture, "Britannia," published in 1729, when 
the nation was intensely excited over attempts by Spain 
to challenge our then newly won dominion of the seas, 
was immensely popular. But it owed its success to its 
opportuneness, rather than to its power, though its 
strains Avere ardent and vigorous enough. We are apt, 
perhaps, to underrate the force of Thomson's patriotic 
verses, from forgetting that he did much to foster the 
national sentiment, and was the original author of many 
expressions that have since become the commonplace 
expressions of that sentiment. Some lines sound like 
very hackneyed stump declamation, but they had more 
heart and meaning in the mouth of the poet of the first 
generation of British ascendancy, when Britain, consoli- 
dated by the union of the Kingdoms, and by the Treaty 
of Utrecht, acknowledged victor in the protracted 
struggle for the empire of the seas and of the new 
worlds, was glowing with the intoxication of newly 
acquired power. But Thomson's next and much longer 
political poem, " Liberty " (1734), in which he narrated 
the career of this goddess, and described the glories that 
she created in Greece and Rome, before fixing her home 
in Britain, fell flat, though the composition of it was his 
chief labor for three years. This was the poem which 
Johnson owns he could not finish : and about which a 



68 A GROUP OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETS 

contemporary wit remarked that the poet "had taken a 
liberty which was not agreeable to Britannia in any 
season.'''' Thomson also wrote for the stage, but without 
success, his one memorable triumph being the song of 
" Rule Britannia." Although Thomson published some- 
times by subscription, he made but a poor income out 
of his poetry, and he was unfortunate in his sinecures. 
Lord Chancellor Talbot, whose son he had accompanied 
as tutor to Italy, made him Secretary of Briefs in the 
Court of Chancery, and he held this office for rather more 
than three years (December, 1733, to February, 1737), 
losing it on the death of his patron. The Prince of 
Wales gave him for some years a pension of one hun- 
dred pounds, but withdrew it in a pet. From 1744 till 
his death he held the sinecure office of one of the Com- 
missioners for the Leeward Islands. 

Thomson must be acknowledged to be one of the 
greatest of our minor poets — i. e., of those that are 
ranked next to the great names of Chaucer, Spenser, 
Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Byron. He 
holds this place in virtue of his vigor of imagination, 
his broad manly sentiment, the individuality of his 
verse, and the distinction of his subject. These have 
given him a remarkable and enduring popularity. And 
measured by his influence on succeeding literature, his 
is by far the greatest figure among minor poets. Both 
in his use of blank verse, and in the easy discursive 
general structure of his poems on the Seasons, he had 
many imitators, the most eminent of whom was the 
poet Cowper. And his influence reached into our own 
century. It was most marked on Wordsworth ; and 
the fact, just put on record by Mrs. Richmond Ritchie 
(Miss Thackeray), that Thomson's "Seasons" was the 
first poetry known to Tennyson in his boyhood enables 
us to understand whence our Laureate received the 
impulse to his minute observation of Nature and country 
life. 



DYERS "GRONGAR HILL 69 

A word or two on another poet, also nourished by 
influences outside Pope's circle, but, unlike Thomson, 
never brought within that circle, John Dyer. He was 
the son of a Welsh solicitor, but abandoned the law 
himself for painting and poetry, and in his early man- 
hood apparently wandered about South Wales as an 
itinerant painter, rhyming as he went. He was born 
in the same year with Thomson, and his first and best 
poem, "Grongar Hill," appeared in Lewis's Miscellany 
in 1726, in the same year with Thomson's "Winter." 
It is a sweet little descriptive poem, in the four-ac- 
cent measure of Milton's " L' Allegro," as pure and 
fresh and clear in its vision of natural objects as any 
thing written by any of the Lakers, and exquisitely 
musical in its numbers. It is Wordsworthian also in 
its moralizing : 

" And see the rivers how they run 
Through woods and meads, in shade and sun ! 
Sometimes swift, sometimes slow, 
Wave succeeding wave, they go 
A various journey to the deep, 
Like human life, to endless sleep ! 
Thus is Nature's vesture wrought 
To instruct our wandering thought ; 
Thus she dresses green and gay, 
To disperse our cares away. 
Ever charming, ever new, 
When will the landscape tire the view ! 
The fountain's fall, the river's flow, 
The woody valleys, warm and low ; 
The windy summit, wild and high, 
Roughly rushing on the sky ! 
The pleasant seat, the ruin'd tower, 
The naked rock, the shady bower ; 
The town and village, dome and farm, 
Each give each a double charm, 
As pearls upon an iEthiop's arm. 

See on the mountain's southern side, 
Where the prospect opens wide, 
Where the evening gilds the tide, 



10 A GROUP OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETS 

How close and small the hedges lie ! 
What streaks of meadows cross the eye ! 
A step, methinks, may pass the stream — 
So little distant dangers seem ; 
So we mistake the picture's face, 
Eyed through Hope's deluding glass ; 
As yon summits soft and fair, 
Clad in colours of the air, 
Which to those who journey near, 
Barren, brown, and rough appear ; 
Still we tread the same coarse way ; 
The present's still a cloudy day." 

In the course of his wanderings as a painter Dyer 
went to Rome, and on his return in 1740 published a 
poem called " The Ruins of Rome." It is in blank 
verse, most musical in its rhythm, and exquisitely deli- 
cate and precise in phrase and epithet ; but its declama- 
tory apostrophes and exclamations strike us now as 
somewhat antiquated ; and its moralizing vein of melan- 
choly sentiment may be said to have been superseded 
for this century by Byron's stanzas in " Childe Harold " 
on the ruins of Athens. 

The following lines on Modern Rome will sufficiently 
illustrate his treatment of blank verse : 

" Behold by Tiber's flood, where modern Rome 
Couches beneath the ruins : there of old 
With arms and trophies gleamed the field of Mars : 
There to their daily sports the noble youth 
Rush'd emulous ; to fling the pointed lance ; 
To vault the steed ; or with the kindling wheel 
In dusty whirlwinds sweep the trembling goal ; 
Or wrestling, cope with adverse swelling breasts, 
Strong grappling arms, close heads, and distant feet ; 
Or clash the lifted gauntlets ; there they formed 
Their ardent virtues ; in the bossy piles, 
The proud triumphal arches ; all their wars, 
Their conquests, honours, in the sculptures live. 
And see from every gate those ancient roads, 
With tombs high verg'd, the solemn paths of Fame ! 
Deserve they not regard ? " 



somerville's "chase" 71 

On bis return to England Dyer entered the Church, and 
reappeared seventeen years later with another poem, 
also in blank verse, " The Fleece." The first lines will 
give you an idea of the subject : 

" The care of sheep, the labours of the loom, 
And arts of trade, I sing." 

This poem, and Somerville's " Chase," a didactic poem 
on hunting (1735), may be numbered among the dis- 
cursive didactic poems called into being by the success 
of Thomson's " Seasons." Where Dyer treats of soils, 
and pastures, and breeds of sheep, and prohibitive legis- 
lation against the export of wool, and fulling, and weav- 
ing, and dyeing, and the foreign trade in wool, he becomes 
more technical than most readers of poetry are prepared 
for ; but intermixed with these technicalities are some 
of the most exquisite passages of description in the 
language. You can easily get at them by means of the 
argument. If all the four books had been like these, we 
could understand Akenside's saying " that he would 
regulate his opinion of the reigning taste by Dyer's 
'Fleece'; for if that were ill received, he should not 
think it any longer reasonable to expect fame from 
excellence." 



CHAPTER VI 

pope — con tinned 

AS A SATIRIST AND MORALIST — FAILURE IN EPIC POETRY — " THE 
DUNCIAD " — "ESSAY ON MAN" 

We have to deal to-day with Pope as a satirist and a 
moralist. His " Dunciad " (1728), his " Essay on- Man " 
(1732-34), " Moral Essays " (1735), and his " imitations 
of Horace" (1733-37) were the great literary events 
of the fifteen years after the publication of Thomson's 
" Seasons," and showed the author in a new vein. They 
were a series of surprises as far as Pope was concerned, 
works that his previous performances had not prepared 
the public to expect. 

Pope's translation of Homer and his editions of 
Shakespeare occupied him till 1725, when he had 
readied the age of thirty-seven, and was in the maturity 
of his powers, with an independence secured by the 
enormous profits of his Homer. Then began the 
third period of his literary career. The works that he 
then produced, and which I have already enumerated, 
are his greatest works in point of literary power. But 
why did he not then produce works of more permanent 
and universal interest ? Why did he not then return 
to his youthful scheme of writing a great epic ? The 
critics of this century have refused Pope a place by the 
side of Milton, because his subjects were of inferior 
quality, appealing to a lower range of human emotion, 
and incapable from their very nature, however excel- 
lent the treatment of them, of being made the subjects 
of equally great poetic achievements. Now, Pope, as 
we have seen, was fully possessed of the idea that a 



A PROJECTED EPIC 73 

great epic was the greatest work that a poet could ac- 
complish ; why, then, when he was free to choose, did 
he not undertake such a work ? 

To answer this we have to look both to Pope's 
character and to his circumstances. He toyed with the 
idea of writing a great epic. He told Spence that he 
had it all in his head, and gave him a vague sketch of 
the subject and plan of it, but he never put any of it 
on paper. This indecision was partly due to his char- 
acter and partly to his circumstances. Partly he shrank 
from the labor, and partly he was turned aside by cir- 
cumstances to other labors which fully occupied his 
energies. One reason why great epics are rare is that 
the composition of them, in addition to imaginative 
genius and genius for rhythmical expression, demands 
an intellectual staying power and energy of will such 
as are rarely found in human beings with or without 
the poet's special gifts. Reflect for a moment on the 
intellectual force that a poet must exert in writing a 
tragedy. To give moving expression to a single tragic 
situation, to imagine and body forth in language that 
all men feel to be true to nature the changes of passion 
in the heart of one character in one of the scenes in 
"Macbeth," or "Hamlet," or " Othello," so that not a 
line shall ring false, requires no ordinary intellectual 
concentration ; but to exhibit in a succession of scenes, 
each profoundly wrought out, a progression of events 
toward a tragic catastrophe, bringing many agencies to 
bear, and assigning to each its right influence, giving 
voice to many and various passionate emotions, sustain- 
ing at every moment and gradually deepening the 
interest of the hearer, observing the hundred conditions 
of tragic effect — this puts an immensely greater strain on 
the strength of intellect and will. Unless the poet goes 
right by a sort of instinct, borne along in a rapturous de- 
light with each triumphant step, he must collapse ; but 
instinct in this case is only another name for intellect, 



74 pope 

one, however, that can hold in its grasp at once and sat- 
isfy at once the conflicting claims of a multitude of condi- 
tions which a weaker intellect can grasp only one by one, 
and can never fully reconcile, because it can never bring 
them all together. It may be doubted whether the 
strain is equally great in epic, because the difficulties do 
not occur with the same cumulative importunity; they 
admit of being vanquished, if not singly, at least in 
smaller detachments. Still, even in epic, the strain is 
such as few men in the history of literature have proved 
equal to, though multitudes have tried. Now, Pope, as 
you know, was not constitutionally a strong man. I 
am not here speaking of muscular strength, but of 
constitutional strength. His life, as he said in the 
prologue to his " Satires," was one long disease. It has 
always been a matter of wonder that, to use Mr. Leslie 
Stephen's phrase, he got as much work out of his frail 
body as he did. One of the secrets of his endurance 
was that he worked in comparative tranquillity. He 
avoided the stress and strain of complicated designs, 
and applied himself to designs that could be accom- 
plished in detail — works of which the parts could be 
separately labored and put together with patient care, 
into which happy thoughts could be fitted, struck out at 
odd moments, and in ordinary levels of feeling. Even 
the work of translating the " Iliad," a very different 
work from creating an epic, weighed very heavily on 
his spirits. After he was fairly committed to it he 
told Spence he was often under great pain and appre- 
hension. " I dreamed often," he said, " of being engaged 
in a long journey, and that I should never get to the 
end of it." 

This shrinking from sustained intellectual strain, to be 
prolonged day after day for weeks or months or years, — 
for a great epic cannot be written in a day, — was prob- 
ably one of the reasons why Pope did not attempt an 
epic, though he liked to think over subjects. The hero 



MOTIVES FOR AVEITING THE " DUNCIAD " 75 

of the one that he had planned was the legendary 
Brutus, the Trojan colonizer and name-father of Britain, 
the invention of the fertile romancers of the twelfth cen- 
tury. Pope proposed to describe how he established 
civil and ecclesiastical order in England — a theme, you 
will observe, that could have been treated in cold blood. 
We have probably not lost much from his never having 
carried out this design. It may be doubted whether he 
had the intellectual strength for a great epic, though in 
the"Eloisa and Abelard " he showed himself capable of 
dealing powerfully with a single tragical situation. 

But now to consider the circumstances that diverted 
him from attempting such an epic as he was capable of, 
and led him into the walks of satire, in which for keen- 
ness and brilliancy of point he has never been surpassed. 
Imitating the epic style, we must ask our Muse of 
Literary History : " Tell me, O Muse, what dire offence 
moved the great Pope to make war upon the little 
dunces. Who were the dunces, and what had they done 
to provoke his ire, so that he spent some years in com- 
posing an elaborate poem designed to subject them to 
everlasting ridicule ? " 

" The history of the ' Dunciad,' " Johnson says in his 
" Life of Pope," " is minutely related by Pope himself, 
in a dedication which he wrote to Lord Middlesex in the 
name of Savage." According to this account, the origin 
of the poem was very simple. Pope and one or two of 
his intimate friends, notably Swift and Arbuthnot, were 
great connoisseurs of good poetry, and one of their 
favorite amusements, — they had formed a little club for 
the purpose in the reign of Anne, fifteen years before 
the publication of the " Dunciad," — was to make fun of 
bad poetry. With this view the intimates had together 
composed a " Treatise on Bathos, or the Art of Sinking," 
in which they collected and invented superlative speci- 
mens of mixed metaphors, preposterous similes, and 
generally of the bombast and extravagance and inanity 



76 pope 

of bad poetry, and classified bad poets according to 
their eminence in the various arts of debasing instead of 
elevating their subjects. These specimens of the bad 
they ascribed to various letters of the alphabet, most of 
them taken at random. Well, no sooner was the treatise 
published than the infatuated scribblers proceeded to 
take the letters to themselves, and in revenge to fill the 
newspapers with the most abusive falsehoods and scur- 
rilities they could possibly devise. " This gave Mr. 
Pope the thought that he had now some opportunity of 
doing good by detecting and dragging into light these 
common enemies of mankind," who for years had been 
anonymously aspersing almost all the great characters 
of the age. Their persistent attacks upon himself had 
given him a peculiar right to their names — and so he 
wrote the " Dunciad." 

In might seem, then, that the Muse of History had 
nothing to tell, but she is an inquisitive Muse, and she 
has not remained satisfied with Mr. Pope's account. If 
the letters of the alphabet were distributed at random 
among imaginary bad poets, it is the most singular 
chance on record that they happened so often to corre- 
spond with the initials of poets and poetasters of the 
time. The gods of the literary Olympus, playing at the 
Art of Sinking, were not quite so innocent in their 
amusements as Pope pretended ; they were rather like 
the little boys in the fable throwing stones at the frogs, 
and they had no right to assume virtuous airs when the 
frogs protested and retaliated. It is, besides, fatal to 
the strict accuracy of Pope's account that the book of 
" Miscellanies " containing the treatise on the Bathos 
was published in 1727, while Pope, from his letters to 
Swift, is known to have been engaged on the " Dun- 
ciad "in 1726, and from internal evidence is conjectured 
to have begun it several years earlier. In extreme 
opposition to Pope's account is another histoiy of the 
affair, adopted by those who take the worst view of his 



MOTIVES FOR WRITING THE " DUNCIAD " 77 

character, and will have it that he was essentially vin- 
dictive and malignant. This view is that Pope's 
motives for writing the " Dunciad " were purely spiteful 
and personal ; that as soon as his hands were free from 
his translation of Homer, and his independence secured 
by the profits of that work, he proceeded to settle old 
scores with those who had not spoken as favorably as he 
liked about his poetry. There is strong justification for 
this view in the fact that the most prominent persons 
ridiculed in the "Dunciad" can be shown to have given 
him offence. Theobald or Tibbald, the original hero of 
the poem, had criticised his edition of Shakespeare, as 
he thought, insolently. Cibber, in whose favor Tibbald 
was subsequently deposed, — the " Dunciad " received 
many alterations and additions after its first issue, — had 
ridiculed a play in which Pope in his earlier days had 
some share, and had retaliated on the first mention of 
his name in the " Dunciad." Dennis was an old enemy. 
Lintot, the publisher, had accused him of unfair prac- 
tices in the division of the profits of the " Odyssey," 
which proved less successful than the " Iliad." And so 
on. You will find the details in any edition of the 
" Dunciad," most fully in the recent edition by Mr. 
Courthope, who has succeeded Mr. Elwin in the task 
begun by Croker. Indeed, it was not denied by Pope 
that the men satirized had previously attacked him ; it 
was openly avowed, and specimens of their attacks were 
prefixed to his own complete edition ; it was these 
attacks, he said, that had given him a right to make use 
of the names of his assailants. 

Was it, then, personal spite, the vindictiveness of 
wounded vanity, as some critics think, or was it, as he 
1 professed himself, " the thought that he had now some 
1 opportunity of doing good," that moved Pope to write 
! the " Dunciad " ? The truth probably lies between the 
two views. Both motives may have operated, as well as 
1 a third not so obvious — an unscrupulous love of fun, and 



78 . pope 

delight in the creations of a humorous imagination. 
Certainly, to represent the " Dunciad " as the outcome 
of mere personal spite is to give an exaggerated idea of 
the malignity of Pope's disposition, and a wrong im- 
pression of his character. He was not a morose, savage, 
indignant satirist, but airy and graceful in his malice, 
writing more in fun than in anger, revengeful, perhaps, 
and excessively sensitive, but restored to good-humor as 
he thought over his wrongs by the ludicrous conceptions 
with which he invested his adversaries. We do not feel 
the bitterness of wounded pride in his writings, but the 
laughter with which that pride was consoled. He loved 
his own comic fancies more than he hated his enemies. 
His fun at the expense of his victims was so far cruel 
that he was quite regardless of their sufferings, probably 
enjoyed them ; but it was an impish and sprite-like 
cruelty, against which we cannot feel any real indigna- 
tion, because it is substantially harmless, while its in- 
genious antics never fail to amuse. And, in extenuation 
of the cruelty, I see no reason to reject Pope's own plea 
that he never took the aggressive, although Mr. Elwin 
has attempted at great length to show that this could 
not be maintained. In the " Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," 
which is Pope's most elaborate defence of himself as a 
satirist, he pretends to greater magnanimity and lofty 
tranquillity of mind than any merely human being can 
possess, and which he himself was undoubtedly far 
from possessing, being really extravagantly sensitive to 
criticism. Still, undue weight may be given to stories 
illustrating how keenly Pope felt criticisms when first 
they were communicated to him, and how long after an 
offence had been committed he seized an opportunity 
of repaying it. Granting the truth of these stories, 
I should still contend that Pope soon recovered his 
equanimity after the first quick anger was past, and 
that there was little or no bitterness in his heart when 
he took his revenge, and that he reconciled this revenge 



INCEPTION OF THE " DUNCIAD " 79 

witb a moral purpose — the chastisement of men worthy 
of chastisement. The " Epistle to Arbuthnot," I believe, 
really represents his permanent attitude of mind, the 
stable condition in which his mind rested when it had 
recovered from any passing derangement of its equilib- 
rium. 

It has been said that to thoroughly enjoy the "Dun- 
ciad " one would have to give as much time to the study 
of it as the author gave to its composition. That, of 
course, is an exaggeration ; still, to appreciate the full 
force of every hard hit and sly pinch, even with the help 
of Mr. Courthope's ample commentary, would doubtless 
require long and laborious study. If you have leisure 
for it, it might be worth while, because in the process 
you would get an intimate knowledge of political and 
literary life in Loudon in Pope's time, and it is always 
interesting to know how people lived in circumstances 
different from our own. This is one of the most harm- 
less ways of indulging that love of gossip which is 
deeply rooted in most human beings. 

But without mastering all the details we may enjoy 
the "Dunciad" simply as a work of humorous imagina- 
tion, the only drawback being the tendency of the 
author's imagination to carry him into physically dis- 
gusting incidents. Pope's original design seems to have 
been to describe the progress of Dulness from ancient 
times to his own generation, ascribing all the disasters 
that happened to learning, such as the burning of the 
Library of Alexandria and the irruption of the Goths 
into the Roman empire, as due to the settled and 
resolute hostility of this goddess, bent upon restoring 
the dominion that she held while the intellectual world 
was still in chaos. In this history he could find oppor- 
tunities for ridiculing the so-called dunces of his own 
time by describing them and their works as instruments 
in the hands of the goddess Dulness for accomplishing 
her purpose. This was probably the germ, the first 



80 pope 

thought, of the poem ; so that the third book, from 
1. 70 onward, was probably the first part thought of, 
if not actually the first composed. But the germ grew 
in Pope's mind ; and now this history of the reign of 
Dulness upon earth appears only as a prophecy made 
to the hero of the poem. Book I. describes the abode 
and the surroundings of Dulness in mock-heroic style, 
but with real splendor of imagination ; the goddess 
sits wreathed in clouds in a certain part of the city of 
London, with her Prime Ministers and all the products 
of her leaden inspiration round her. Then the hero, 
Colley Cibber, is described offering prayers and sacrifices 
to the goddess. She hears him and carries him off to 
her sacred dome, and anoints and proclaims him King 
of the Dunces. Book II. describes the games held in 
honor of his coronation, a burlesque of the heroic cus- 
tom. Much of this you had better skip ; but toward 
the end there is an account of a reading match among 
critics that is very amusing. Book III. is chiefly occu- 
pied with a vision of the progress of Dulness. After 
the games the king falls asleep in the lap of the goddess, 
and visits in his dreams — after the manner of Ulysses 
in the " Odyssey " and iEneas in the " ^Eneid " — the 
nether regions, where he meets Settle, a dull poet of 
the previous generation. Settle talks to him, and takes 
him to the top of a mountain, whence he shows him 
the past triumphs of the empire of Dulness, then the 
present, and lastly the future. Book IV. was added by 
Pope many years afterward (in 1742), and professes 
to be the completion of the prophecies in Book III. 
The goddess sits in state, surrounded by her flatterers 
and parasites ; various public bodies appear by dep- 
utation before her and report progress. The con- 
clusion is intensely comical ; in the middle of a 
gracious speech from the throne her Majesty yawns, 
and the whole world follows suit and sinks into 
slumber : 



pope's notion of the dull 81 

" More she had spoke, but yawn'd. All nature nods : 
What mortal can resist the yawn of gods ? 
Churches and chapels instantly it reached ; 

(St. James's first, for leaden G preached) ; 

Then catch'd the schools ; the hall scarce kept awake ; 

The convocation gap'd, but could not speak : 

Lost was the nation's sense, nor could be found, 

While the long solemn unison went round ; 

Wide, and more wide, it spread o'er all the realm ; 

Ev'n Palinurus nodded at the helm ; 

The vapour mild o'er each committee crept ; 

Unfinished treaties in each office slept ; 

And chiefless armies dozed out the campaign ; 

And navies yawned for orders on the main." 

Apart from the mere personalities of the poem, most 
of the Dunces satirized are types that reappear in every 
age. On this ground some critics claim for the poem 
a universal utility, and praise Pope for having rendered 
permanent service in the warfare of true literature 
against counterfeit. This fantastic Pope showed him- 
self perfectly sensible that, in so far as concerned the 
annihilation of Dunces, his work had been written in 
vain. Even of the men ridiculed by name, Pope says : 

" You think this cruel ? take it for a rule 
No creature smarts so little as a fool. 
Who shames a scribbler ? breaks one cobweb thro' 
He spins the slight, self-pleasing thread anew : 

Throned in the centre of his thin designs, 
Proud of a vast extent of flimsy lines, 
Whom have I hurt ? has Poet yet or Peer, 
Lost the arch'd eyebrow, or Parnassian sneer ? " 

And if this was true of the Dunces expressly ridiculed, 
who is likely in after generations to take their characters 
to himself ? Mr. Courthope specifies three classes of 
Dunces in the poem : the authors of personal scurrilities 
in the journals of the day, who took great liberties with 
eminent names, in the same coarse vein in which Pope 
6 



82 pope 

replied to them ; the party journalists, whom Pope, 
as a member of the Opposition, considered to be in 
ministerial pay ; and pedantic scholars, antiquaries, and 
naturalists. In the pursuit of ridicule Pope was not 
particular about truth to nature, and there are two men 
in particular whose place in the " Dunciad " lias generally 
been considered absurd, Cibber and Bentley, the great 
classical scholar. Cibber was a popular actor, and he 
protested that his greatest enemy could not call him 
dull ; he was nothing if not lively. But Pope did not 
mean by dull the opposite of lively. Dulness, he says 
in his lines about Cibber : 

" Dulness with transport eyed the lively dunce, 
Remembering she herself was pertness once." 

It is not, indeed, easy to say what he did mean by dull, 
except uninteresting to himself. The stoiy is told of 
him that he once fell asleep at his own dinner-table 
when the Prince of Wales was talking to him about 
poetry. With such a man the Dull must have been a 
very wide category. I am afraid he would have con- 
sidered the critical study of the "Dunciad " insufferably 
dull if it had been written by any body but himself. It 
would seem, indeed, as if in the end he had come to 
much the same conclusion as Thackeray in his "Book of 
Snobs." When Thackeray had carefully studied all the 
varieties of snob, he could not resist the humorous con- 
clusion that he might after all be a snob himself. And 
something of the same humor seems to me to have 
crossed Pope's mind before he had completed his 
" Dunciad." It is a dull world, and we are all dunces 
more or less. 

We have left little time for Pope's remaining works — 
the "Essay on Man," the "Moral Essays," and the 
" Satires " and " Epistles." As regards the origin or 
suggestion of them, they are as much due to the influ- 
ence of Bolingbroke as the " Dunciad " was to Swift 



THEORY OF A RULING PASSION 83 

and Arbuthnot. Then there are the theological and 
moral controversies. One little circumstance that has 
not been remarked probably contributed to set Pope at 
work in this new direction. In the year in which he 
finished his " Odyssey" Young, afterward the author 
of " Night Thoughts," published a satire called " The 
Universal Passion, or The Love of Fame." It is a very 
unequal production, but it was immensely popular for a 
time. This may have excited Pope's emulation, more 
particularly seeing that the satirist — Pope having then 
been engaged for ten years on Homer — asked, Why 
slumbers Pope ? 

As regards the substance. If you wish to make a 
study of the " Essay on Man," which professes to fur- 
nish in verse a system of natural theologj^, I would 
recommend you to Mark Pattison's edition. Moral 
maxims tend to become antiquated. Pope's are old 
enough to be commonplace, but not old enough to be 
quaint. In the " Moral Essays " the one you may per- 
haps find the most interesting is that on " The Char- 
acters of Women." His standpoint is stated with per- 
fect candor in the opening lines : 

" Nothing so true as what you once let fall, 
' Most women have no characters at all,' 
Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear, 
And best distinguished by black, brown, or fair." 

And again in the lines : 

" In men, we various ruling passions find ; 
In women, two almost divide the kind ; 
Those, only fix'd, they first or last obey, 
The love of pleasure, and the love of sway." 

In these statements Pope repeats a commonplace of 
his day, and if objection be taken to them, we must bear 
in mind that we are not to look in satire for sober, strict 



84 POPE 

truth, but rather for brilliant paradoxes. The theory of 
a Ruling Passion is probably a correct one, and it has 
been misunderstood by adverse critics. Macaulay, in 
his essay on Mine. D'Arblay, calls it a silly notion, his 
own theory being that each man is a compound of 
desires often at war with one another, one having the 
ascendancy sometimes, and sometimes another, each 
uppermost by turns like the spokes of a running wheel, 
or the sails of a windmill, or balls playing in a fountain. 
Where is Shylock's ruling passion? he asks. Or 
Othello's? or Henry V.'s? 

The theory is declared to be at variance with the 
diversity of nature. Rightly understood, it was not so. 
Its advocates only contended tliat, however various 
might be the passions of mankind, however often they 
might come in conflict, still there was one before which, 
when it came to a fight, every other yielded. Under- 
standing the theory in this way, we should have no 
hesitation in saying that Shylock had a ruling passion — 
the hatred of a persecuted race for its persecutors. 
Even his love of money gives way before this, as his 
affection for his daughter gives way before his love of 
money. The strength of his ruling passion is indeed 
indicated by its triumph over the passion next to the 
throne when the two come in conflict. He has few 
opportunities, only one indeed in the course of the play, 
of obtaining substantial gratification for it ; that one 
he eagerly and fiercely seizes on. 

It cannot, of course, be said that such a passion is the 
key to all the mysteries of a man's nature ; that is, of 
course, a rhetorical expression. But a knowledge of it 
may be a clue to the secret of a man's deviations from 
the rules of ordinary prudence or ordinary good feeling. 
It is seldom that one overgrown propensity swallows up 
all the rest. True ; but unless this is the case the char- 
acter attracts no interest, because it possesses no singu- 
larity, nothing to distinguish it from the mass of man- 



THEORY OF A RULING PASSION 85 

kind, whose ruling passion is selfishness tempered by 
sympathetic impulse, and fear of what people will say 
and do. That this is the right interpretation of the 
theory } r ou can prove by taking Pope's examples. It 
explains a man's singularities ; gives unity to his pecul- 
iarities as distinguished from others. 



CHAPTER VII 

POETRY BETWEEN POPE AND COWPER 

GLOVER— JOHNSON— COLLINS — THE POET AND THE ORATOR- 
GRAY 

I propose to-day to run rapidly over the poetry of 
the forty years, roughly speaking, between Pope and 
Cowper, Crabbe and Burns, dwelling more particularly 
on the poetry of Gray and Collins. This period is 
generally and justly regarded as one of the most barren 
in our literature. The poems that have any interest, 
except for the antiquary, are few and far between. 
Collins and Gray wrote very little, very much less than 
any poets of equal rank in literature ; the one dying 
young, and the other composing at rare intervals. 
Small as their poetry is in amount, it stands out above 
the level of the time, owing to its originality and indi- 
viduality ; all the others may be roughly classed as 
imitators either of Pope or of Thomson, or of both. 

If we look at the works of the young poets who 
ventured to publish during the last years of Pope's life, 
what principally strikes us is that, with the exception of 
Gray and Collins, the ablest of them were guided in 
their aims by the poetical ambitions of Queen Anne 
society. One youth, a London merchant, Richard 
Glover, was bold enough to attempt what Pope shrank 
from, the composition of a great epic. The subject was 
taken from Greek history, but the poet throughout had 
an allusive eye to contemporary politics. This reference 
to practical affairs was thoroughly in the Queen Anne 
spirit, when the poets, as I explained to you, being 



GLOVER'S " LEONIDAS " 87 

intimate companions of public men, took sides in party 
conflicts, and kept in view the assistance of their friends 
at least as much as the satisfaction of the poetical aspira- 
tions of their readers. Glover's hero was Leonidas, the 
Spartan king who sacrificed himself at Thermopylae to 
hold in check the Persian invaders of Greece ; and the 
grasping tyrant Xerxes was the great enemy against 
whom the hero had to contend. But Glover the poet 
was an ally of the politicians opposed to Sir Robert 
Walpole, and one of the accusations against this Minister, 
urged most persistently by the Opposition to drive him 
from power, was that he truckled to the power of Spain, 
meekly negotiating and compromising British interests 
when a true patriot would have had recourse to war. 
Hence when Glover wrote in denunciation of the power 
of Persia, it was the power of Spain that he had in his 
mind's eye ; and when he eloquently expounded through 
Spartan senators the true duty of a patriot, the readers 
were expected to apply this as an argument against Sir 
Robert Walpole. "The plan and purpose of 'Leoni- 
das,' " it was said, " is to show the superiority of freedom 
over slavery, and how much virtue, public spirit, and 
liberty are preferable both in their nature and effects to 
riches, luxury, and the insolence of power." Incidentally 
the poet found opportunity to discuss many of the burn- 
ing questions — treatment of the non-combatants in war, 
superiority of a citizen army over mercenaries. " Leoni- 
das " had thus great temporary popularity. Viewed 
simply as an artistic production, its great novelty was 
that, although professing to be a great epic, it had no 
supernatural machinery. " Never was an epic poem," 
Lord Lyttelton wrote, " which had so near a relation to 
common-sense. He has neither fighting gods nor scold- 
ing goddesses ; neither miracles nor enchantments ; 
neither monsters nor giants in his work ; but whatever 
human nature can afford that is most astonishing, mar- 
vellous, and sublime." The metre of the poem was 



88 POETRY BETWEEN POPE AND COWPER 

blank verse, modelled on Thomson's. But in the labored 
descriptions of scenery be is much less definite in his 
pictures than Thomson ; in fact, Glover's descriptions 
show all the faults of the conventional style : 

" The plain beyond Thermopylae is girt 
Half round by mountains, half by Neptune laved. 
The arduous ridge is broken deep in clefts 
Which open channels to pellucid streams 
In rapid flow sonorous. Chief in fame, 
Spercheos, boasting once his poplars tall, 
Foams down a stony bed. Throughout the face 
Of this broad champaign, numberless are pitched 
Barbarian tents. Along the winding flood 
To rich Thessalia's confines they extend. 
They fill the vallies, late profusely blest 
In Nature's vary'd beauties." 

Then after enumerating the shrubs, flowerets, ivy, lawn, 
poplar groves torn up, cut down, trampled by the bar- 
barian invaders, he goes on : 

" Yet unpolluted, is a part reserved 
In this deep vale, a patrimonial spot 
Of Aleuadian princes, who, allies 
To Xerxes, reign'd in Thessaly. There glow 
Inviolate the shrubs. There branch the trees, 
Sons of the forest. Over downy moss, 
Smooth walks and fragrant, lucid here and broad, 
There clos'd in myrtle under woodbine roofs, 
Wind to retreats delectable, to grots, 
To silvan structures, bow'rs, and cooling dells 
Enliven'd all and musical, with birds 
Of vocal sweetness, in relucent plumes 
Innumerably various. Lulling falls 
Of liquid crystal, from perennial founts 
Attune their pebbled channels." 

However long you study this description, you will not 
be able to realize any landscape that was definitely 
before the poet's vision when he wrote ; there is a cer- 



"LONDON, OR THE PROGRESS OF COMMERCE" 89 

tain vague framework of scenery, but when the poet 
comes to details, he puts us off with conventional oft- 
repeated phrases for natural grandeurs and beauties — 
the laving Neptune, arduous ridges, pellucid and 
sonorous streams,, winding floods, Nature's varied 
beauties, downy moss, retreats delectable, grots, sylvan 
structure, bowers, and cooling dells. The poet, in 
short, only gives us musical phrases for what the senses 
find in nature, thus dressing these charms to advan- 
tage ; there is nothing in his landscapes of the life that 
the human imagination in moments of excitement is 
apt to ascribe to the face of Nature. Read the Prologue 
to act iv. of " Henry V." and you will understand the 
difference. 

There is one poem of Glover's, — " London, or the 
Progress of Commerce," — that illustrates the fashion- 
able poetical style of the Queen Anne time — the prev- 
alent idea as to how Nature was to be dressed to 
advantage. As a London merchant, Glover no doubt 
felt his heart swell within him as he looked at the 
bustle of many nations on the London wharves, and saw 
ships from many distant regions crowding up the 
Thames. How did he give expression to this exaltation 
of mind ? He could not present the coarse and vulgar 
details of trade to a fine Queen Anne gentleman ; lie 
asks his reader to look at them through a fine allegorical 
veil, transports us to the regions of mythology, and 
gives a long narrative of a love affair between the sea- 
god Neptune and the nymph named Phoenice, the 
guardian spirit of the Phoenicians. The beautiful 
nymph Commerce was the offspring of this Union. 
This is the poet's way of relating the prosaic fact that 
the Phoenicians were the first great traders by sea ; and 
the events in the subsequent history of Commerce are 
given as incidents in the life of the nymph Commerce, 
from her cradle and nursery till the time when she fixed 
her abode in Great Britain. 



90 POETRY BETWEEN POPE AND COWPER 

Among the followers of Pope in Satire there is only 
one name of distinction, Samuel Johnson, afterward 
the great prose moralist, critic, and lexicographer. The 
critic made his mark in literature by a poem ; but he is 
one of the exceptions to the saying that the critics are 
the men who have failed in literature, for his imitation 
of Juvenal was a success. It was natural that Johnson 
should choose Juvenal as his model while Pope adopted 
the style of Horace. Horace was the gay, light-hearted 
satirist of the foibles of the literary and fashionable 
society of Rome ; whereas Juvenal took a more stern 
and gloomy view of life, lashed the vices of his age in 
a spirit of moral indignation, contrasted the miseries of 
the poor with the ostentatious splendor of the rich in 
Roman society, and denounced heartlessness, dishonesty, 
sycophancy, — all the vices of a wealthy and showy 
civilization, — with bitter and unsparing scorn. There 
was nearly as much difference between them as between 
Tom Moore and Cartyle. Pope, himself in easy circum- 
stances, and the friend of noblemen and statesmen, 
naturally had most sympathy with Horace's view of 
life ; while Johnson, then living in London, as Carlyle 
describes him, on fourpence halfpenny a day, and earn- 
ing a precarious livelihood as a bookseller's drudge, as 
naturally thought of Juvenal as a model, and resolved 
to apply to modern circumstances the sarcasms of this 
satirist on the Roman metropolis. 

" Slow rises worth by poverty depressed," 

is one of the lines in Johnson's "London." He had 
fitter experience of the fact in the insolence and in- 
difference of busy employers, too closely occupied with 
other affairs to have time, if they had had the insight, 
to detect his great talent. As far as versification goes, 
Johnson proved himself an apt pupil of Pope ; nobody 
since has equalled him in combining Pope's terseness 
with Pope's smoothness. And in one respect Johnson 



GRAY AND COLLINS 91 

even might be said to have surpassed Pope, if Pope's 
object had been merely to imitate the ancient Roman. 
Johnson is at more pains to find exact modern parallels 
to the ancient situations, and is always felicitous in the 
turn he gives to Juvenal's phrases. But the truth is 
that he went to work rather as a scholar than as a 
satirist. Indignation at the vices satirized was much 
less a motive with him than the scholar's ambition to 
make a clever adaptation of the original. Hence, 
although his "London" attracted some attention, and 
Pope, always generous as well as right in his judg- 
ments of genuine literary merit, prophesied that the 
author would not long remain unknown, there was little 
real vitality in the poem. It was really an imitation, 
owing much of its interest to the original, and often 
appearing destitute of motive when not read in con- 
nection with the original. Pope's so-called imitations, 
on the other hand, are equally interesting to the reader 
whether or not he is acquainted with Horace ; the 
reader perhaps may get additional pleasure from observ- 
ing the cleverness of the parallel, but the satire has 
independent point and relish. There is more of John- 
son's genuine sentiment in the "Vanity of Human 
Wishes," another imitation of Juvenal, published ten 
years later. 

For eminence in poetiy, novelty and distinction are 
first requisites ; and during Pope's closing years the 
only poets that began to show capability of poetic work 
that should be at once distinctive in power or spirit and 
high in quality were Gray and Collins. The great 
novelty of their work as compared with Pope's was that 
it was lyrical ; they wrote mostly in that form of 
poetry which is called the Ode. 

You are doubtless familiar with some, at least, of 
Gray's poems. Yon all know the " Elegy." But the 
" Elegy " was not the work on which he most prided 



92 POETRY BETWEEN POPE AND COWPER 

himself, or upon which he would have desired his rank 
as a poet to be adjudicated. It was instantaneously, 
and has always since been, popular, but he considered 
that the popularity was due to the subject as much as 
to the art of the poet. The " Ode on the Distant 
Prospect of Eton College," the "Hymn on Adversity," 
the "Progress of Poesy," and "The Bard," were his 
masterpieces in point of artistic construction. It may 
increase your interest in them if I point out a few 
respects in which these lyrics differ from other tyric 
poetry in our language — i. e., poetry in which the poet 
gives expression directty to emotion, instead of describ- 
ing outward nature, or narrating events, or putting 
words into the mouths of characters whose actions are 
represented on the stage. 

But, perhaps, I had better speak of Collins first, as he 
is less known, and there is one poem of his which I can 
confidently recommend to you as certain to yield you 
the highest delight, if you take the trouble to master its 
intricate harmonies. Of his life there is little to be told, 
and that little is painful. Born in 1721, and educated 
at Oxford, he went to London in 1744, the year of Pope's 
death, as a literary adventurer, at a time when only one 
man, and that Pope, had succeeded in making literature 
a profitable profession. He had not Johnson's endur- 
ance, or his practical talents ; a youth — strange phe- 
nomenon for those who take the conventional view of the 
eighteenth century — of fantastic imagination, with not 
a little of the temperament of Shelley, delighting, as 
Johnson puts it, " to rove through the meanders of 
enchantment, to gaze on the magnificence of golden 
palaces, to repose by the waterfalls of El} T sian gardens." 
Two years before he went up to London he had pub- 
lished a volume of poems, " Persian Eclogues," Persian 
Pastorals, reconciling, as you will observe, the taste of 
the time for pastorals with the inclination of his own 
fancy toward the gorgeous East. For such a man the 



COLLINs's " ODE TO EVENING " 93 

booksellers had little employment ; and as he had but 
scanty means of subsistence except by his pen, he gave 
way in the struggle for existence ; he bore up for a 
little against clouds that he felt to be gathering on his 
reason, was confined for some time in a madhouse, and 
died, at the age of thirty-nine, in the year of Burns's 
birth, 1759. 

Collins is best known by his Ode on " The Passions," 
but incomparably his finest and most distinctive work is 
the " Ode to Evening." The superior popularity of 
" The Passions " is easily explained. It might be recited 
at a penny reading, and every line of its strenuous 
rhetoric would tell ; every touch would be at once 
appreciated. But the beauties of the " Ode to Evening " 
are of a much stronger kind, and the structure of it is 
infinitely more complicated : 

" If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song, 
May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear, 
Like thy own solemn springs, 
Thy springs, and dying gales ; 

" Now air is hush'd, save where the weak-ey'd bat, 
With short, shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, 
Or when the beetle winds 
His small but sullen horn, 

" As oft he rises 'midst the twilight path, 
Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum : 
Now teach me, maid compos'd, 
To breathe some softened strain, 

" Whose numbers stealing through thy darkening vale, 
May not unseemly with its stillness suit, 
As musing slow, I hail 
Thy genial lov'd return ! 

" While Spring shall pour his showers, as oft he wont, 
And bathe by breathing tresses, meekest Eve ! 
While Summer loves to sport 
Beneath thy lingering light : 



94 POETRY BETWEEN POPE AND COWPER 

" While sallow Autumn fills thy lap with leaves, 
Or Winter, yelling through the troublous air, 
Affrights thy shrinking train, 
And rudely rends thy robes : 

" So long, regardful of thy quiet rule, 
Shall Fancy, Friendship, Science, smiling Peace, 
Thy gentlest influence own, 
And love thy favourite name ! " 

It gains nothing from being read aloud. It is a poem to 
be taken into the mind slowly ; you cannot take posses- 
sion of it without effort. Give a quiet evening to it ; 
return to it again and again ; master the meaning of it 
deliberately part by part, and let the whole sink into 
your mind softly and gradually, and you will not regret 
the labor. You will find yourselves in possession of a 
perpetual delight, of a music that will make the fall 
of evening forever charming to you. Difficulty is not 
necessarily a virtue in a poem, but neither is it neces- 
sarily a defect. The poet who fixes a rare and evan- 
escent mood in harmonious rhythm and imagery, thus 
making it a permanent possibility for the human race, 
cannot always build his new and delightful home for 
the imagination out of common materials, and the work- 
manship with which he adorns it may be curious and 
intricate. Such a pleasure-house is often built up by 
abstruse workings of the imagination, in regions far 
above the prosaic level, and the spirit must shake off its 
natural sloth fulness before it can rise with the poet and 
enter into and take possession of the home that he has 
made for it. 

A distinction has been drawn between the poet and 
the orator. The poet, it has been said, is essentially an 
egotist, expressing what he feels without caring how it 
may affect others ; whereas the orator is essentially a 
sympathetic man, always considering the effect of his 
expression upon others ; striving to look at what he says 



COLLINS AND GEAY COMPARED 95 

from their point of view, or, as Mr. Gladstone once put 
it, receiving from bis audience in a vapor what lie gives 
back to theni in a flood. I confess that I don't attach 
much value to such distinctions. They are always half 
truths. Nearly every thing that has been said by poets 
in the way of general truth about poetry is not even 
quarter truth, because each puts his own practice as if 
it were a universal rule. All poets express their own 
emotions, more or less, and all poets are more or less 
influenced by their audience. Still the degree in which 
they are self-centred, or liable to be disturbed by out- 
side influence, constitutes a marked difference in 
character, and, properly qualified, this distinction be- 
tween the poet and the orator serves to illustrate the 
difference between Collins and Gray. It is this differ- 
ence that Mr. Swinburne has in his mind when he says 
that, " as a lyric poet, Gray is unworthy to sit at the 
feet of Collins," and that " there was but one man in 
the time of Collins who had in him a note of pure lyric 
song, a pulse of inborn music irresistible and indubita- 
ble " — namely, Collins himself. Comparatively speak- 
ing, Collins sang to gratify his own feelings, beginning 
when the impulse was on him, and leaving off when he 
was satisfied ; Gray considered in what mood his song 
would find his audience, how he could seize their atten- 
tion, how sustain and increase it, and how leave them 
deeply impressed at the end. Gray, in short, wrote 
with a deliberate eye to the effect to be produced on his 
reader. 

Even in the "Elegy," which reads like a spontaneous 
outburst of feeling, this is apparent if you look at the 
construction of it. You will find a regular symmetrical 
division in it, an arrangement of facts such that the 
reader, though he passes from one train of thought to 
another, is not kept too long in one mood, not wearied 
by reflections in the same vein. The variety is studied 
and carefully proportioned. Gray deliberately sup- 



96 POETRY BETWEEN POPE AND COWPER 

pressed one stanza, because to have put it in would have 
made too long a parenthesis : 

" There scattered oft, the earliest of the year, 
By hands unseen are show'rs of violets found ; 
The redbreast loves to build and warble there, 
And little footsteps lightly print the ground." 

The stanza is beautiful in itself ; some have gone so far 
as to say that it contains purer poetry than any of the 
stanzas that were retained ; but Gray decided that it 
would be out of proportion, and sacrificed it. 

In the " Eton College," again, the change from 
emotion to emotion, the balance of the parts, the 
pathetic humor of the conclusion, which recalls and binds 
together and suffuses the whole, must strike every-body 
who reflects for a moment on the construction of the 
poem. The effect of the whole, and of each part as 
contributing to the whole, has been elaborately calcu- 
lated, elaborately, and yet with such vividness of emo- 
tional insight that there is no trace of labor. Stanza 
follows stanza as if by spontaneous growth, and the con- 
cluding reflection arises as if by irresistible suggestion. 

It has been made a point of distinction between Gray 
and the lyric poets of this century, Wordsworth and 
Byron more particularly, that in their lyrics they 
express purely personal emotion, feelings peculiar to 
themselves. They take us into confidence, as it were, 
about their own concerns, and invite our sympathy, 
which we cannot give unless we sympathize with their 
characters. Gray, on the other hand, suppresses himself, 
and strives to interpret emotions that all men must feel 
in presence of the subject of his verse. This is certainly 
true of the " Elegy " and the " Ode on Eton College." 
These are not expressions of individual feeling, like 
Byron's " Farew r ell to England," or some of Words- 
worth's "Solitary Reaper"; they express melancholy 
and humorous reflections common to all mankind, as 



JOHNSON CONTRASTED WITH GRAY 97 

common as the fact of death and the heedless enjoyment 
of the present by the young. 

But it is dangerous to generalize about poets. The 
emotions to which lyrical expression is given in the 
" Progress of Poesy " and the " Bard " are as purely 
individual as the most singular of Wordsworth's medi- 
tations on rustic life. Johnson's criticisms of these 
wonderful wonders of wonders, as he called them, are 
savage and unsparing. Sometimes this is attributed to 
personal jealousy. It is a superficial view, and unjust to 
the great critic. It is true that Johnson manifests a 
good-humored contempt for Gray's character. We can 
easity understand this when we consider the circum- 
stances of the two men. Gray was a Fellow of a College 
in Cambridge, precise, finicking, and reserved in manner. 
The dignified little man had few intimates ; he was 
a great reader, a scholar of marvellously wide range, 
reputed the most learned man in Europe. But, as 
Johnson saw and said, he did very little with his learn- 
ing. Five or six poems was not a great result of so 
much reading. We can easily understand that the 
indefatigable producer under difficulties, the sturd} 7 , 
strenuous, companionable giant of Bolt Court, Fleet 
Street, — a very different locality from Peterhouse, Cam- 
bridge, — would have little sympathy with such a man. 
Beneath Gray's reserved exterior there was great depth 
of feeling ; and with all his minute scholarship he was 
a man of large and comprehensive views. Constitutional 
melancholy and self-distrust seem to have been the 
secrets of his small amount of production. But this 
was not known fully to the world till after his death. 
He never spoke out during his life. Any apparent 
injustice done him by Johnson was due to a want of 
knowledge that was not possible to Johnson when he 
wrote. And as regards the Odes, we can understand 
Johnson's want of sympathy without ascribing any part 
of it to personal jealousy. They appeal really to scholars 
7 



98 POETRY BETWEEN POPE AND COWPEE 

and historians. The Greek motto fixed to the " Progress 
of Poesy " signifies that they are vocal only to the 
initiated. There is not a line that is not charged with 
a historical allusion. So marvellous is the rhythm that 
single stanzas may be read with delight ; but the signifi- 
cance of the whole demands study. The substance of 
them is a series of ecstatic visions of historical events ; 
of the personal emotions felt by a historian who was 
also a man of feeling and imagination. The "Bard" is 
full of alliteration and personification, and exemplifies 
the rhetoric of Gray. There is a quick transition when 
the Bard foretells the accession of the House of Tudor 
and the glory of Elizabeth : 

" ' But oh ! what solemn scenes on Snowdon's height 
Descending slow their glitt'ring skirts unroll ? 
Visions of glory, spare ray aching sight, 
Ye unborn Ages, crowd not on my soul ! 
No more our long lost Arthur we bewail. 
All hail, ye genuine Kings, Britannia's Issue, hail ! ' 
' In the midst a Form divine ; 
Her lyon-port, her awe-commanding face, 
Attempered sweet to virgin-grace. 
What strings symphonious tremble in the air, 
What strains of vocal transport round her play ! 
Hear from the grave, great Taliessin, hear ; 
They breathe a soul to animate thy clay. 
Bright Rapture calls, and soaring, as she sings, 
Waves in the eye of Heav'n her many-colour'd wings."' 



CHAPTER VIII 

DECLINE OF POETKY — THE NOVEL 

WALPOLE'S CRITICISM — WHY THE WANT OF POETRY WAS NOT 
FELT — DIARY OF A LADY OF QUALITY — RISE OF THE NOVEL — 
" PAMELA " — CONNECTION WITH MAGAZINE LITERATURE — 
FIELDING — HISTORICAL NOVELS — " THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO " 

I gave some account in my last lecture of the great 
poets of the middle part of the eighteenth century. 
Why there was such a scarcity of good poetry during 
that period is a question that admits of great diversity 
of opinion ; that there was a scarcity of it is a matter 
of fact, and it was felt at the time. In this, as in most 
other social facts, there were probably several causes at 
work. One of these causes is very plainly hinted at 
in a contemporary letter by a very shrewd observer, 
Horace Walpole, second son of the great Prime Min- 
ister. Writing to his friend Sir Horace Mann in 1742, 
he said : " If you did amuse yourself with writing 
any thing in poetry, you know how pleased I should be 
to see it, but for encouraging you to it, d'ye see, 'tis an 
age most unpoetical ! 'Tis even a test of wit to dislike 
poetry ; and though Pope has half a dozen old friends 
that he has preserved from the taste of last centmy, yet 
I assure you the generality of readers are more diverted 
with any paltry prose answer to old Marlborough's 
secret history of Queen Mary's robes. I do not think 
an author would be universally commended for any 
production in verse, unless it were an ode to the Secret 
Committee, with rhymes of liberty and property, nation 
and administration." 

This is in effect to say that, in the opinion of Horace 

99 



100 DECLINE OF POETEY 

Walpole, fashionable society was too much occupied 
with politics to have any interest to spare for poetry. 
To understand how this was possible we must remember 
that political power was then confined to a very narrow 
circle. It was not, as you are aware, till nearly a cen- 
tury afterward that the middle classes, the commercial 
classes, obtained a share of political influence. The 
men who had any chance of a voice in the management 
of the affairs of the nation were the men whose wives 
and daughters constituted polite society in the metrop- 
olis — " the town," as they called themselves. And 
intrigues were incessantly going on to keep Ministers 
on or put Ministers out, in all of which the wives and 
daughters took a keen interest. The affairs of the 
State were the affairs of the town, and had an exclusive 
absorbing and personal interest that they no longer 
possess for any single section of the commuity now. 
Hence the literature that had most direct interest for 
the town was political, and a damaging attack on a 
Minister, a piece of scandal or argument, whether in 
prose or in verse, was apt to eclipse an} r production that 
depended for its effect on the interest peculiar to poetry. 

The absorbing interest in politics among those who 
were at the time the chief patrons, promoters, and con- 
sumers of literature was probably one of the causes of 
the poetic barrenness of the middle of the eighteenth 
century. This political interest was fed and nourished 
by the press with a regular supply, weekly, bi-weekly, 
and daity. 

Among the other things that may be mentioned as 
taking the place of poetry among the enjoyments of a 
life of leisure at this time is the stage. Queen Anne 
and her Ministers exerted themselves to purify and 
reform the stage. Under Charles II. ladies went to the 
theatre masked, and things were spoken that were not 
very fit for them to hear. Queen Anne prohibited the 
wearing of masks, and instituted a moral censorship of 



DIARY OF A LADY OF QUALITY 101 

plays, insisting that every tiling intended for public per- 
formance should first be submitted to the Lord Chamber- 
lain. That official was not so particular as he is now, but 
there was a marked improvement in the morality of plays. 
The theatre took a more important place among fashion- 
able amusements. It has not, I think, been remarked 
that the dreariest period in the poetic annals of the 
eighteenth century is almost exactly coincident with the 
career of David Garriek. You will see how a powerful 
counter-attraction at the theatre, such as would occupy 
the serious attention of intellectually disposed people, 
would diminish the demand for poetry, and rob the poet 
of that devoted sympathy in the absence of which he 
cannot work with full power, if you consider for a little 
how people of leisure at that time distributed their day. 
There is an amusing paper in the Spectator, No. 323, 
which professes to give the diary of a lady of quality. 
It is, of course, a caricature, but it gives us an idea of the 
arrangement of a fashionable day, of the hours that were 
kept by fashionable people : 

" From three to four. — Dined. Mrs. Kitty called upon me to go 
to the Opera before I was risen from table. 

" From dinner to six. — Drank tea. Turned off a footman for 
being rude to Veny. 

" Six o'clock. — Went to the Opera. I did not see Mr. Froth till 
the beginning of the second act. Mr. Froth talked to a gentle- 
man in a black wig. Bowed to a lady in the front box. Mr. 
Froth and his friend clapped Nicolini in the third act. Mr. 
Froth cried out Ancora. Mr. Froth led me to my chair. I think 
he squeezed my hand. 

"Eleven at night. — Went to bed. Melancholy dreams. Me- 
thought Nicolini said he was Mr. Froth." 

The morning was spent in reading, if there was any 
thing to read, playing with pets, seeing to the dress- 
maker, shopping, going to church, the mid-day service at 
St. Paul's, where the music was good, being especially 
fashionable. Half-past two or three was the dinner- 



102 THE NOVEL 

hour. After dinner was the time for making calls or 
walking in the Mall; and in the evening there were 
public entertainments and private assemblies. There 
was probably then a greater separation than exists now 
in the social amusements of men and women ; after 
dinner the men went to the coffee-houses if they did not 
go to the play, and the women went to tea-parties, where 
throughout the greater part of the century card-playing 
was the chief alternative to scandal and other small talk. 
The theatres opened at five o'clock, and the entertain- 
ment lasted till nine. You will thus see that the theatre 
filled an important gap in the day ; and that, when it 
was the rage, it was likely to absorb not a little of 
fashionable interest. Under Garrick revivals of Shakes- 
pearian plays were the great theatrical events ; earlier 
in the century, revivals of Dryden. The morning was 
the chief time for reading. Addison's lady of quality 
on two of her mornings read Dryden's " Aurengzebe, or 
the Indian Emperor " ; if she had lived thirty years 
later, she would probably have spent the same time over 
Shakespeare. Can you wonder that such solemn pon- 
derosities as Johnson's " London " or "Vanity of Human 
Wishes," or such intricate harmonies and sublimities as 
Collins's "Ode to Evening" or Gray's "Progress of 
Poesy," failed to arrest general attention when the 
vacant hours of the morning could be spent in reading 
the thrilling scenes of " Richard III." or " Othello," and 
the evening in seeing Shakespeare's heroes imperson- 
ated by the most original modern actors? The town 
naturally yielded to the greatest attraction, and there 
was no body of readers outside this fashionable society 
in whose sympathy the poet might find nourishment. 

Two kinds of literature, then, imperatively claimed a 
portion of the hours available for reading in the reigns 
of the first Georges — political journals and plays. 
People in society were bound to read these, because they 
were talked about ; and not to know them or appear to 



Richardson's " Pamela" 103 

know them was to have nothing to say, or no grace in 
listening. And there was a third kind which became 
prominent in the second ten years of George II.'s reign, 
about the time when Pope published the last of his 
Satires. This was the novel. New forms of literature, 
as I have before said, always have the advantage in 
freshness and force of interest over old forms. The 
novel appeared in a new form with Richardson's 
" Pamela" in 1740. About the time when Horace Wal- 
pole wrote the letter from which I quoted at the begin- 
ning of the lecture, ladies at Ranelagh Gardens, then 
one of the fashionable resorts, were holding up to each 
other their copies of " Pamela," to show that they had 
in their possession the most popular book of the day. 
The industrious antiquarian has cast doubt upon the 
literal truth of this story, pointing out that Ranelagh 
Gardens were not opened to the public till eighteen 
months after "Pamela " had begun to run through many 
editions. Vauxhall, however, was open, if Ranelagh 
was not, and the incident may have been observed there. 
At any rate, the fact expressed by the story is true 
enough, that " Pamela " was at once and universally 
popular. In January, 1741, the editor of the Gentle- 
mail's Magazine wrote as follows : " Several en- 
comiums on a series of Familiar Letters, published but 
last month, entitled ' Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded,' 
came too late for this Magazine, and we believe there 
will be little occasion for inserting them in our next ; 
because a Second Edition will then come out to supply 
the Demands of the Country, it being judged in town as 
great a sign of want of curiosity not to have read 
1 Pamela ' as not to have seen the French and Italian 
dancers." This testimony is almost as quaint and 
significant as the story about Ranelagh Gardens. Books 
must be new in form as well as in substance before they 
create such a furore as that indicates. There has been 
nothing like it in my time. The nearest approach 



104 THE NOVEL 

I recollect is J. R. Green's "Short English History." 
Fashionable ladies carried it about with them on their 
visits to country-houses. 

Richardson has long received the honor of being re- 
garded as the founder of the English Novel, but of late it 
has been customary to go a little farther back, and trace 
the beginnings of the novel in the papers by Addison and 
Steele in the Tatler and the /Spectator. The novel, it is 
said, was developed, not created, by Richardson. Now, 
this is hardly fair to the ingenious printer, if it is meant 
to deny him the credit of having invented or stumbled 
upon a new species of composition — the novel of 
manners, stories in which the characters are drawn from 
ordinary domestic life, and of which the interest lies in 
picturing how they affect one another and how they are 
affected by circumstances. It is true that the novel was 
developed, and not created ; but it is not more true of 
Richardson's novel than of any other new species of 
composition, such as Marlowe's tragedy, or Scott's 
romantic tale, or Byron's personal epic. All alike are 
developed, not created, in the sense of having many 
affinities with the kind of literature immediately anterior 
to them. Thus in the novel of manners there are two 
elements — there is a description of ordinary character, 
and there is plot-interest — i. e., there is a story. Both 
of these elements are found in the generation before 
Richardson, but not in combination. It was he that 
combined them in his novel of manners, and therefore 
is he entitled to the praise of having invented a new 
species of composition. 

You will find abundant descriptions of manners in 
the Spectator, and many delicate studies of character. 
Whoever wishes to get a living knowledge of the Queen 
Anne time must give evenings to the Spectator, and 
observe the incidents that are pictured as occurring in 
the shops and the streets and the places of amusement, 
at balls and tea-tables and dinner-tables, and the private 



THE " SPECTATOR'S " CORRESPONDENTS 105 

sanctuaries where fine ladies issue adorned for conquest. 
The quiet Spectator penetrated everywhere. Especially 
in the letters from fictitious correspondents, — from 
Jenny Simper, Aurelia Careless, Betty Cross-stitch, 
Constantine Comb-brush, Florinda, Corinna Jeraminta, 
Jack Courtty, Toby Rentfree, Will Cymon, Dick Love- 
sick, and so forth, — you will find many happy studies of 
manner and character, many of the touches of nature 
that make all the world kin. But there is no story to 
weave the detached studies together. We learn how 
Jenny Simper — being, as she described herself, a young 
woman with her fortune to make — went to church, and 
was much aggrieved because the clerk of the parish, an 
ex-gardener, w T reathed the pews so thickly with ever- 
greens that she could not make eyes at the desirable 
baronet during the service ; but it had not occurred to 
any body to make a heroine out of Jenny Simper, or a 
hero out of the baronet, or a story out of incidents 
within the probabilities of ordinary life. There were 
stories to read in the days of Queen Anne ; there have 
been stories from the very beginning of literature ; but 
they were of a different kind from the stories told in 
novels of manners. There were, in the first place, the 

i great long-winded romances, full of amazing adventures, 

I; heroes of superhuman strength and courage and gener- 
osity, and heroines of surpassing beauty and constancy. 
The sceptical spirit had banished them from polite 

-! society in town, but they still lingered in the country 

/ and in the less enlightened strata of middle-class life, 
and, on the whole, perhaps did good with all their 

| unreality, through their high standard of ideal conduct. 
There were stories of another kind, stories of fashionable 

i intrigue, to which the name of novel was sometimes 
given — stories that served no good purpose. Finally, — 

' though this was not in the reign of Queen Anne, but in 
the reign of her successor, George I., — there came the 

U novels of adventure and crime — the invention of Defoe. 



106 THE NOVEL 

Richardson did not invent stories any more than he 
invented the description of manners, but that does not 
in the least detract from the originality of his invention 
of the domestic novel — a story of incidents all within 
the area of possible occurrences in every-day life. The 
idea of writing such a story came to him by accident. 
He was an industrious and prosperous printer — a stout, 
rosy, vain, prosy little man, not at all the sort of man 
that might be expected to be a fashionable novelist. 
Of poor parentage, he had been apprenticed to a London 
printer ; had spent some years as a press-reader or proof- 
corrector — not a bad position for acquiring a knowledge 
of literature ; had married his master's daughter, and 
acquired an extensive business. When he was near the 
age of fifty, some bookseller friends of his, struck, per- 
haps, by his excellence as a letter-writer, had suggested 
to him that he should compose a " familiar letter- 
writer " — " a little volume of letters in a common style, 
on such subjects as might be of use to those country 
readers who were unable to indite for themselves." In 
his youth, as it happened, Richardson had had a singular 
experience in the way of writing letters for others. 
Three young women who could not write had employed 
him, when he was a boy of thirteen, to conduct their 
correspondence with their sweethearts, which he did, 
he tells us, much to the satisfaction of his employers, and 
without betraying their confidence. This may have 
been known to the booksellers who suggested his writ- 
ing a volume of model correspondence. At any rate, he 
undertook the task. But, having a genius for story-tell- 
ing, it occurred to him, as he turned the project over in 
his mind, that he might tell a story in a series of letters, 
which would serve equally well as models for letter- 
writing, and at the same time cultivate the principles of 
virtue and religion in the minds of the youth of both 
sexes. Accordingly, he chose a country girl, Pamela, in 
the service of a young squire, Mr. B., and made her 



THE ORIGIN OF " PAMELA " 107 

relate in letters to her friends her experiences from day 

to day and week to week in very trying circumstances. 

Friends write to advise Pamela in her difficulties, and 

so the story is carried on with most circumstantial 

minuteness, Pamela describing with the most careful 

exactness every particular of what happens to her, and 

adding her own reflections, surmises, and appeals for 

approbation and advice. The effect of this method is 

that, if you have any sympathy with the heroine, you 

get intensely interested in her perplexities ; the very 

fulness of the details, and the close truth to nature with 

which the novelist follows every turn in the girl's 

i thoughts, compel you to read on. No one can read over 

a few scenes from Richardson without feeling that he is 

, a master of his art ; but few people now, I imagine, read 

^ any of his novels through. It was otherwise in his own 

generation, when readers had more in common with the 

, thoughts and sentiments of his voluminous descriptive 

i letter-writers. The fame of " Pamela " made Richard- 

1 son a great personal favorite, especially with ladies. 

; Several ladies of quality made a pet of him, deluged him 

i with confidences, and urged him to write more; and 

junder their nattering encouragement he produced 

"Clarissa Harlowe," a model of every virtue in higher 

life, and " Sir Charles Grandison," his ideal of a perfect 

i gentleman. " Clarissa" is universally acknowledged to 

he his masterpiece. An anecdote was given b} r Macaulay 

iwhich shows how entrancing the story may become to 

readers once fairly caught by the current of it. He 

-took the whole eight volumes with him when he was in 

India to a hill-station during the hot season, and lent 

the first volume to the Governor's wife. She read it 

«;and lent it to the Governor's secretary, and went to 

Macaulay for the second. Thus the whole eight volumes 

i passed from hand to hand, and for a week or more the 

.whole station was in a ferment over the fortunes of 

wlarissa, the readers anxiously waiting their turn for the 



108 THE NOVEL 

successive volumes. Richardson is long-winded and 
prolix to a degree, but tbat, in spite of all bis faults of 
style, he had the art of interesting his own generation 
was abundantly proved, and apparently his greatest 
novel is still capable in favorable circumstances of exert- 
ing its spell. 

A much more brilliant writer, though a less minute 
anatomist of ebbs and flows and cross-currents of feel- 
ing, was Richardson's great successor and caricaturist, 
Henry Fielding. Two men more unlike than these two 
pioneers of the modern novel could not be conceived. 
Richardson's experiences were all of business life and 
quiet domestic life. In his voluminous correspondence 
with lady friends after his sudden leap into fame, which 
seems not to have disturbed in the least the even tenor 
of his habits, we have minute pictures of the circum- 
stances in which he wrote his books — sometimes in his 
back shop in Fleet Street, sometimes in an arbor in his 
garden at Hammersmith, reading what he had written 
to the young ladies of his family, talking with them 
over his characters, judging from their criticisms as the 
story went on whether he had produced the effects 
intended. Fielding was a much less domesticated 
character — a high-spirited, mirth-loving roisterer, the 
son of a younger son of a noble family, who, when his 
scanty allowance ran short, or was not paid at all, tried 
to subsist by writing for the stage and the journals,! 
organized a company of his own, started more than one 
journal of his own, mai'ried a wife and spent her small i 
fortune in a year or two, read for the bar, and obtained 
an appointment as a police-magistrate, never contriving 
to make both ends meet, yet never losing his cheerfulness 
or his generous temper. With all his wit and keem 
powers of observation Fielding was probably too much 
hurried and pressed with the cares and enjoyments of 
his happy-go-lucky life from day to day to be capable 



RICHARDSON AND FIELDING CONTRASTED 109 

of striking out a new path in literature ; and it was by 
an accident that lie fell into the track of the humble 
tradesman-like printer, and then discovered a rich field 
> for his genius. When " Pamela " became the rage, there 
was much in the sentiment of it that appealed to Field- 
ing's sense of the ludicrous, and he resolved to write a 
parody. Beginning in this spirit, he wrote a few 
r chapters, more eminent for wit than for delicacy, and 
I then practically abandoned the design of burlesquing 
i Richardson, and went on to describe life as he had seen 
it in the course of his varied experience, and characters 
j as they presented themselves to his own mind and heart. 
The life that he described was not always the highest in 
point of morality, and his characters were not always 
, spotless ; but there is this to be said for him as a 
\\ moralist, that he threw no sentimental halo over vice, 
. that he honored true worth in manhood and in woman- 
ii hood, that his Parson Adams, his Squire Allworthy, and 
his Amelia are among the most lovable characters in 
fiction, and that no satirist ever exposed meanness, 
i hypocrisy, and kindred vices with healthier scorn and 
ridicule. Apart from the substance of his work, his 
method was very different from Richardson's. He 
.discarded the epistolary way of telling his story. The 
comic epic was his model. Hence Byron called him the 
i "prose Homer of human nature." And he does not 
.leave his characters to reveal themselves, as the so-called 
1 dramatic novelist does, — as Dickens does, for example, — 
i in what they do and say. He makes a running commen- 
tary on their conduct as he goes along ; button-holing 
you, as Thackeray puts it, while he conducts you through 
rhis picture-gallery, and discoursing familiarly about the 
creatures of his imagination. 

ii I cannot here enter upon an elaborate criticism of 

i Richardson and Fielding. I wish only to show you their 

places in literature as the originators of a new species 

of composition, which, while it was fresh and new, and 



110 THE NOVEL 

practised by masters of tlieir art, helped to push poetry 
out of a foremost place in the minds of the reading 
public. I would recommend you to read what is said 
about Fielding by Thackeray in his "Lectures on the 
Humorists," and by Mrs. Oliphant on Richardson. I 
will not dwell upon the immediate successors of these 
pioneers, Smollett, Sterne, ami Goldsmith, but pass on 
to a novel of a new kind, produced twenty-five years 
after Richardson's "Pamela," Horace Walpole's " Castle 
of Otranto." 

It would almost seem as if, after twenty years of the 
new kind of fiction inaugurated by Richardson, includ- 
ing the masterpieces of Fielding and Smollett and 
Sterne, the literary appetite began to pine for something 
new, and to hark back to the old fare of supernatural I 
romance. You must not suppose that the old-fashioned 
stories were at once extinguished by the new style ; they 
were only pushed into the background, relegated, per- I 
haps, to a less fastidious class of readers. If you look at 
the lists of published books in old numbers of the 
Gentlemanus Magazine, you will see that publishers 
still found readers for scandalous stories, for romances | 
such as the " Adventures of Telemachus," and for more 1 
or less fictitious biographies of eminent criminals. But 
it was only novels of the new kind that made a con- 
spicuous mark among readers in the height of literary 
fashion — till the " Castle of Otranto" appeared, which | 
was professedly an attempt to combine the supernatural:! 
incidents of the old romance with the truth to nature in 
dialogue and character introduced by the new novel. 

It was Horace Walpole's opinion that in the novels ' 
of every-day life Nature had cramped Imagination.! 
There had been plenty of invention, but it was inven-jl 
tion of scenes such as might occur in common life ; the i \ 
novelists had excluded themselves from the great{| 
resources of fancy. He thought that, for the sake of 
greater variety, the fancy should be left free to " roam 



THE "CASTLE OF OTKANTO " 111 

through the boundless realms of invention," and thus 
have an opportunity of creating more interesting situa- 
tions. But he freely admitted that it would never do 
to go back to the condition of the old romances, in 
which every thing was unnatural, in which not only the 
incidents were improbable, but the conduct of the per- 
sonages in the face of those incidents fantastic, their 
language absurdly inflated, their sentiments preposter- 
ous. He proposed, therefore, a compromise between 
the two. He was to have liberty to defy the rules of 
probability in the incidents, but he was to bind himself 
to adhere to probability in what he made his characters 
feel and say and do in the improbable emergencies. 
Their lot was to be cast in a land of wonders, of strange 
apparitions, and miraculous occurrences, but they were 
to comport themselves as human beings might be ex- 
pected to do in the circumstances. 

Constructed deliberately on this plan, the " Castle of 
Otranto " founded a new school of fiction. It is called 
a Gothic Romance, and the scene is laid in a Gothic 
castle, with a labyrinth of vaulted passages beneath it, 
one of which, by a trap-door, communicates with a 
church in the neighborhood. Manfred, the Prince of 
Otranto, is the central figure in the story, a bold and 
unscrupulous man, though not without redeeming 
traits in his character. The title to the principality has 
been in his family for only two generations before him, 
and the title of his grandfather was more than doubtful. 
The last prince of the rightful line was Alfonso the 
Good, who died in the Holy Land ; the Marquis of 
Vicenza was the nearest heir, but Manfred's grand- 
father had forestalled him, and was powerful enough 
to keep him out of his own. There was a mysterious 
prophecy that Manfred's line would keep possession 
till the house had become too small for its rightful 
owner. Now, naturally there was one point about 
which Manfred had a morbid anxiety — the perserva- 



112 THE NOVEL 

tion of his line. His wife Hippolyte had borne him 
but two children, a boy and a girl. The boy was a 
puny, sickly child, but Manfred determined to marry 
him to the only daughter of the rival claimant, the 
Marquis of Vicenza. He obtained this Lady Isabella 
from her guardians during her father's absence in the 
Holy Land, and the supernatural part of the story 
begins with the preparations for the wedding. The 
wedding party is assembled in the chapel of the castle, 
when, to Manfred's intense impatience, it is discovered 
that the boy-bridegroom, — he was only fifteen, — is miss- 
ing. A servant is sent in haste to his apartments on 
the other side of the court. The servant returns star- 
ing, speechless, and foaming at the mouth. Manfred 
and his retainers rush into the court, and find the poor 
boy mangled and bleeding, crushed to death by a 
gigantic helmet of black steel with huge black plumes. 
The helmet is a hundred times as big as any ever made 
for mortal man, and the plumes are in proportion, and 
seemed to filled the court-yard as with a black forest. 
Manfred is astounded, but in the depth of his grief and 
wonder he has presence of mind enough to say : "Take 
care of the Lady Isabella" — for a purpose which 
appears presently. Nobody can tell where the helmet 
has come from, but in the midst of their conjectures 
a young peasant remarks that it is exactly like in every 
respect but size to the helmet on the head of the black 
marble statue of Alfonso the Good in the church. 
Manfred flies into a passion. Some of the servants 
rush to the church, and find that the helmet from 
Alfonso's statue is gone. The cry is raised that the 
young peasant, who is a stranger in the place, is a 
necromancer, and that it is he who, by his black art, 
has compassed the death of the young prince. Manfred 
orders him to be confined in the helmet, to starve to 
death unless his familiars supply him with food. Then 
Manfred proceeds to carry out a suddenly formed 



THE iC CASTLE OF OTRANTO " 113 

resolution. The supernatural thwarting of his purpose 
has maddened him. He will divorce his wife and 
marry Isabella himself. He sends for Isabella and 
broaches his design to her. She is horrified. He lays 
hands on her. Then the plumes on the helmet outside 
in the court-yard are violently agitated, and rustle 
against the window, accompanied by a low, hollow 
sound. "See," Isabella cries, "Heaven itself declares 
against your wicked purpose ! " " Heaven nor Hell 
shall prevent me ! " he says. At this instant one of the 
pictures on the wall, the portrait of his grandfather, 
heaves a deep sigh, and presently walks out of its frame 
on to the floor. 

These examples will give you some idea of how Wal- 
pole effected his proposed reconciliation of reality and 
romance. The only real importance of his work is that 
it marks a new point of departure from the novel as 
conceived by Richardson and Fielding. 



CHAPTER IX 
the novel — continued 

INFLUENCE OF PEKCY's "RELIQUES" AND OSSIAN — MISS BUBNEY 
AND THE LADY NOVELISTS 

! 
At the close of last lecture I mentioned that Wal- 1 

pole's " Castle of Otranto " founded a new school of 
novels, the novels of supernatural incident. It was also 
the first to direct the attention of novelists to the great 
wealth of materials for their craft that might be found j 
in feudal times, lawless, turbulent characters, unbridled 
passions, and picturesque costume and architecture. 
The very year after the " Castle of Otranto " was 
published there appeared what I take to be our first 
Historical Romance, " Longsword, Earl of Salisbury." 
I only know the work from the description of it in the 
Monthly Review of the time, — I have never been able to 
get sight of the book itself. It is never mentioned in 
our literary histories, as far as I know. According to 
the Monthly Review, it made an attempt to follow 
historical truth ; " the truth of history was artfully 
interwoven with entertaining fictions and interesting 
episodes." This could not be said of the " Castle of 
Otranto," which, although the scene was laid in feudal j 
times, had no basis in actual historical fact. "Long- 
sword," then, seems to have been the first anticipa- 
tion in species, if not in quality, of Scott's historical 
romances. 

But, indeed, it would give a wrong impression of the 
way in which the public mind is gradually prepared for 
the reception of a writer of genius, and the atmosphere 
created in which he finds vital sustenance, to ascribe the 

114 



INFLU 

initiative in an^ 
man or one work 
injustice of denyi 
ing the modern 1 
out at the same ti 
essential feature of 
possible that, owing 
lay on his originality, a. 
standing out more prominent 
predecessors, more sharply mi. 
than he really was. The individua. 
bat he does not create out of nothin 
pared for him, and the materials graduu 
which he seizes upon and turns to new & 
vidualstake new departures, take the lead in n^ 
tions into the untried and unexplored ; but the 
and means for the expeditions are first accumulated . 
the co-operation of many. Thus the " Castle of Otranto " 
and " Longsword " were new departures ; but about the 
time when they were made there was a general harking 
back to the customs and the literature of the Middle 
Ages. A } r ear after the publication of Walpole's romance, 
1765, Bishop Perc} r published his famous " Reliques of 
Ancient English Poetry " ; and, a few years before, 
Macpherson had produced first his "Fragments" of 
ancient Gaelic poetry, and then his pretended translation 
of the Ossianic epics, " Fingal " and " Temora." The 
study of mediaeval antiquity was in fact becoming a very 
general pursuit among the learned when Walpole took 
the lead in introducing the sentiment of it into prose 
fiction. 

It was some years before Walpole had an eminent 
; successor in his own peculiar walk of romance, flavored 
i with supernatural or quasi-supernatural incident. The 
next conspicuous romance of this species was Mrs. 
I Radcliffe's " Mysteries of TJdolpho," published nearly 
. thirty years later. Meantime, in 1778, a conspicuous 



■ dson school of 
d and sustained 
world amidst the 
1 the press. This 
a was the first of a 
jex in this branch of 
irs between Sterne's 
j" Waverley " the chief 
, ere carried off by women — 
,iiffe, Miss Edgewortb, and Miss 
that became classic during this 
imes of women, 
/as the first woman to achieve first-rate 
. the modern novel, thirty-eight years after 
iii had led the way into the new form. But 
-O not to suppose that during that long period 
men had abstained from trying a kind of writing for 
which women have such special qualifications in their 
keen eye for manners, their quick sense of the ridiculous, 
and sharp insight into character. Very soon after the 
invention of the novel circulating libraries were also 
invented ; novel-reading became a passion, and novel- 
writing one of the few money-making branches of lit- 
erature. As early as 1752 the Monthly Review, a 
monthly organ of literary criticism started in 1748, 
complained of the labor of reading the multitude of 
novels submitted to its judgment. They spring up like 
mushrooms every year, every work of merit producing 
a swarm of imitators. In 1755 a witty writer in the 
Connoisseur proposed to establish a literary factory, 
and, of course, the manufacture of novels was to be a 
prominent part of the business, an eminent cutter-out 
being retained for the plot and leading adventures, witli 
numerous assistants competent to fill in details. To 
supply the eager needs of the circulating library many 
translations were also made from the French, the novels 
of Marivaux and Mme. Riccoboni being special favor- 



mrs lennox's "female quixote " 117 

ites. Such being the demand for novels, as soon as 
this delightful form of literature was invented, women 
were well to the front both as translators and as origi- 
nal authors. There was Mrs. Charlotte Lennox, for 
example, a lady with a literary career of nearly half 
a century, which began very prosperously but ended 
rather unhappily, the old lady, who for so long had, 
supported herself by miscellaneous work with her pen, 
being under the necessity of writing after her powers 
had fallen off. She was one of the great Johnson's 
favorites, and the success of her first novel, " Harriet 
Stuart," in 1751, was celebrated by a supper at the Devil 
Tavern, where the mighty "Rambler" crowned her with 
laurel. Her next work, the " Female Quixote," in 1752, 
was a still greater success. It certainly is a very amusing 
book. It describes the adventures of a beautiful young 
lady whose father, a powerful Minister, having retired 
from the world in disgust at his fall from office, kept her 
in complete seclusion in the country. Here the young 
lady, finding a complete collection of the fantastic 
romances to which I have referred as being fashionable 
in Queen Anne's time, accepts in all seriousness their 
ideals of heroism and love and the proper behavior of 
lovers, models her lonely life with her maids after the 
fashion of the romantic heroines, and keejos her mind 
constantly occupied with expectations of romantic ad- 
ventures. Encountering a stranger in one of her rides, 
she takes him for a desperate lover come to carry her 
off by force, and behaves as romantic princesses do in 
such circumstances, orders her servants to secure and 
disarm the unfortunate man, and treats his protests as 
signs of villanous duplicity. She takes one of her 
father's gardeners for a prince in disguise, and is hardly 
disabused of her fancy when the young man is cudgelled 
by the head gardener and dismissed, being caught in 
the act of stealing carp from a fish-pond. Her father 
wishes to marry her to a cousin, whom he invites to his 



118 THE NOVEL 

castle to make her acquaintance with this object ; but 
she is deeply offended with the young man because he 
does not make love in the high-flown manner of ro- 
mantic chivalry, and, instead of serving her faithfully 
and humbly for several years before with faltering 
voice and devout reverence he begs the unutterable 
favor of kissing her hand, blurts out a declaration 
of love after a few weeks' acquaintance. As you may 
suppose, man}' capital situations occur before Arabella 
is enlightened as to the difference between the ways of 
real life and the ways of seventeenth-century romance. 
The story is rather wire-drawn, but full of humor. 
Johnson continued a friend to the authoress to the last, 
and wrote proposals for printing a quarto edition of her 
works in 1775 ; and it would seem that, with all her 
various literary industry, Mrs. Lennox needed such ser- 
vices as old age came upon her. She would seem to 
have been not particularly amiable in private life, if 
we are to believe Mrs. Thrale's judgment (recorded in 
Mme. D'Arblay's " Diary "), that every-body admired 
Mrs. Lennox, but nobody liked her. Miss Fielding, the 
sister of the novelist, also wrote several novels, and in 
the opinion of Richardson, who was not a little jealous 
and spiteful toward his rival and caricaturist, showed a 
more intimate knowledge of the human heart than her 
(gifted) brother. This was not the general opinion, 
though an admirer wrote of her that " Miss Fielding 
was one of those truly estimable writers whose fame 
smells sweet, and will do so to late posterity, one who 
never wrote 

' One line which dying she would wish to blot,' " 

a compliment that could hardly be paid to Henry 
Fielding. 

Another female novel-writer, whose fame has been 
kept green by the fame of her children and her great- 
grandchildren, was Mrs. Frances Sheridan, the authoress 



MRS. FRANCES SHERIDAN 119 

of "Sydney Biddulph" and " Nourjaliad," and the 
mother of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. In the opinion 
of Charles James Fox, "Sydney Biddulph " was the 
best of modern novels, and Johnson wept over it, and 
complimented the authoress by telling her that he 
doubted whether " on moral principles she had a right 
to make her readers suffer so much." It is a curious 
circumstance that precisel} 7 the same complaint of carry- 
ing the sufferings of a heroine to an intensely painful 
pitch, harrowing the reader with continuous and unre- 
lieved and undeserved distresses, might be brought 
against more than one of the powerful novels of her 
great-granddaughter, the Hon. Mrs. Norton, especially 
against " Stuart of Dunleath." The " Memoirs of 
Sydney Biddulph " appeared in 1761, and Mrs. Sheri- 
dan was undoubtedly the most eminent female novelist 
before Miss Burney ; although, according to Mrs. Bar- 
bauld, Mrs. Brooke, another indefatigable novelist and 
translator, whose " Lady Julia Mandeville " was repub- 
lished in Mrs. Barbauld's collection, was the " first 
female novel-writer who attained a perfect purity and 
polish of style." 

You will see, then, that women had not been idle in 

the new field of literature before Miss Burney produced 

her " Evelina," though this lady was the first to take 

rank with the masters of the art. " She," says Macaulay, 

"first showed that a tale might be written in which 

both the fashionable and vulgar life of London might 

be exhibited with great force and with broad comic 

humor, and which yet should not contain a single line 

i inconsistent with rigid morality, or even with virgin 

I delicacy. She took away the reproach which lay on a 

i most useful and delightful species of composition. She 

vindicated the right of her sex to an equal share in a 

fair and noble province of letters." This is true in the 

main, as is generally the case with Macaulaj^'s broad 

and vigorous rhetoric, only it is a trifle exaggerated. 



120 THE NOVEL 

All the female novelists that I have mentioned were 
unexceptionable in point of morality, as much so as 
Miss Burney. Macaulay was probably thinking of the 
female novelists of a much earlier period when he praised 
Miss Burney for her delicacy — of Mrs. Behn and Mrs. 
Manley and Mrs. Haywood. There is no lack of purity 
in the "Female Quixote," and "Sydney Biddulph " 
would compare favorably in this respect with Victorian 
novelists. And for more than thirty years before the 
appearance of "Evelina" her sex had taken an equal 
share with men in novel-writing, at least in point of 
quantity. It was the masterly natural freshness of the 
character-drawing, the clear, unencumbered vivacity of 
the incidents, the frankness of the humor, — in a word, 
the originality, the absence of literary artificiality, — 
that signalized " Evelina " as a work of genius, and 
set every-body talking about the new writer. Miss 
Burney was not the first woman novelist, but she was 
the first with a distinct vein of her own who wrote 
with her eyes on the subject, and not on any estab- 
lished model of approved style. Macaulay is more 
exact when he speaks of the great force and broad 
comic humor with which Miss Burney depicted vulgar 
as well as fashionable life. It was the picture of vulgar 
life, — life in a would-be fashionable tradesman's family, 
— that specially attracted notice in an age when the 
fashionable world had been described to death in hun- 
dreds of periodical essays and novels. We happen to 
have preserved for us a good deal of the talk that went 
on about "Evelina" in the first months after its appear- 
ance when it was all the rage. Miss Burney published 
it anonymously, not even her own father knowing who 
was the author ; and she recorded in her diary, which 
is almost as delightful as her novels, what she heard 
people saying about the book and its characters. It 
was the vulgar characters that were particularly com- 
mented on and admired. The position of the heroine 



CHARACTER-DRAWING IN " EVELINA " 121 

Evelina was such as to bring her in contact with various 
classes. Her origin was mysterious, but she had been 
brought up by a clergyman in the countiy, and when 
she was seventeen, she was brought out in London 
society by a lady who knew her mother's history. 
Thus in the first part of the story we have descrip- 
tions of the rustic beauty's experiences at a ball, an 
opera, a ridotto, a visit to the Ranelagh Gardens, 
a visit to the Pantheon. The girl's timidity, the 
I scrapes she falls into in consequence, and her encoun- 
: ters with an empty fop, an enamoured but unscrupulous 
baronet, and an accomplished, noble-minded, high-bred 
lord, who, of course, eventually marries the heroine, 
are described in a vein of the most exquisite comedy. 
In Lord Orville Miss Burney succeeded in drawing 
what Richardson attempted in Sir Charles Grandison 

■ — a perfect gentleman, who is at the same time not the 
least of a prig. Evelina's ignorance and timidity get 
her into scrapes, but these are nothing to the troubles 

■ caused by a terrible relation on the mother's side, a 
vulgar Frenchwoman, her grandmother, Mine. Duval, 

I who very soon turns up. The scenes between this most 
amusing harridan and her friend's husband, Captain 
Mirvan, a salt of the oldest school, are boisterously 
farcical. The old tar hates the French, and, conceiving 
a violent animosity against Mine. Duval, makes it his 
chief amusement to draw the old hag, as he puts it, 
putting her into violent passions, insulting her in every 

: way imaginable, devising practical jokes at her expense. 
One of these, in which he and the baronet, who for 

. interested reasons is his ally, disguise themselves as 

< highwaymen, drag her roughly from her carriage, and 
leave her with her legs tied in a ditch, first tearing 

! off her false hair, has uncomfortable consequences for 

. Evelina, for her grandmother insists upon taking pos- 
session of her, and carries her off to the society of cer- 

, ; tain poor relations in the city. The Braughton family 



122 THE NOVEL 

and their lodger, Mr. Smith, were the great hit of the 
book. Mr. Braughton, the father, was a silversmith in 
Snowhill, a close-fisted, money-making tradesman, but 
his girls were quite fine ladies, and their radiant vul- 
garities, their squabbles with their rude brother Tom, 
their contempt for their country cousin Evelina, their 
respect for the great Mr. Smith, made excellent sport 
for the fashionable readers of Miss Burne} T 's novel. It 
amused them vastly to see all the foibles and artificial 
distinctions of polite society travestied by these lower 
animals. There is Mr. Smith, in particular, the first- 
floor lodger, a city clerk with an immense conceit of 
superiority to the vulgar herd round him, a sort of 
pinchbeck master, who patronized Evelina and intro- 
duced her to all the glories of a Hampstead ball, where 
Mine. Duval, the French grandmother, danced a minuet, 
to the grinning admiration of all beholders. Mr. Smith, 
in the fine tambour waistcoat of which he was so self- 
conscious, was the delight of Miss Burney's readers. 
" The Holborn beau for my money," laughed Dr. John- 
son to Miss Burney ; "O you sly rogue, you character- 
monger." The adventures of Evelina with the Bra ugh - 
tons are conceived in the spirit of the liveliest farcical 
invention. When Miss Burney comes to her third 
volume and the unravelling of her plot, which contains 
not a few ingenious surprises, she becomes more con- 
ventional and sentimental, but nothing could be better 
than the freshness of incident and humorous character- 
drawing of the first two volumes. It says something 
for the humanity of the time that Captain Mirvan was 
generally considered to have gone too far in his baiting 
of the old Frenchwoman Mme. Duval and the silly fop 
Mr. Lovel. This should be remembered when a certain 
episode in the third volume is quoted as an example of 
the brutality of manners among the upper classes. Two 
young men of the period staying at a fashiopable country- 
house, in their passion for betting, get up a race of a 



miss burney's early associations 123 

hundred yards between two poor old women who can 
hardly walk, and when one of the hobbling old things 
falls and hurts herself so badly that she can do no more, 
her backer swears at her and urges her on with unfeeling 
cruelty, the whole company standing by to enjoy the 
fun. We should bear in mind that such conduct was 
as abhorrent to the general sentiment of Miss Burney's 
time as it is to the general sentiment of our own time. 
It was not upon such incidents that the popularity of 
Miss Burney's "Evelina" was founded. 

It was a matter of wonder to Miss Burney's contempo- 
raries how a writer who showed such an intimate knowl- 
edge of high life could at the same time have acquired 
the knowledge of vulgar middle-class life shown in her 
portraits of the Braughton family. The explanation 
lay in the peculiar position of the authoress's father. 
She was the daughter of Dr. Burney, a man of consider- 
able celebrity in his time, an intimate of the Johnson 
and Reynolds circle, author of a " History of Music," 
and the most fashionable music-master of his genera- 
tion. His high place in his profession made him a man 
of note in Continental schools of music, and foreign 
singers coming to England made a point of coming with 
an introduction to Dr. Burney. And while they were 
! negotiating an enslavement in London, the strangers fre- 
quently gave a taste of their quality in Dr. Burney's 
i drawing-room. There is, besides, a sort of freemasonry 
.among artists, which makes them willing to render 
■• any little service they can to the good-natured and 
i popular in the brotherhood. Hence all the world was 
<n eager to come to Dr. Burney's musical parties, where 
dithey could always hear the newest and most dis- 
tinguished things in music ; and on the evenings when 
5 Mrs. Burney received, the music-master's humble house 
'". in St. Martin's Street was beset with fashionable car- 
L riages. The quiet demure little daughter, who sat shy 
'uand silent in company while her brain was teeming with 



124 THE NOVEL 

comic fancies, and, as is often the way with shy, demure 
people, boiled over with comic reminiscences to her 
sisters when the visitors were gone, had thus excellent 
opportunities of stuctying the ways of the fashionable 
world. But Dr. Burney was not a proud man. He 
allowed his children to play with the children of a wig- 
maker in the adjoining houses. And among these 
humbler acquaintances Miss Burney picked up that 
acquaintance with life in a different plane of society 
which made the fortune of her first novel. 

Sometimes it is said now that "Evelina "was over- 
rated in its day. It is impossible not to acknowledge 
that she painted manners and habits with sprightliness 
and fidelity, but it is said that "when she rises from 
manners and habits to paint feelings, we see little but 
indecision on the one hand or exaggeration on the 
other." This is all very true, and yet Miss Burney was 
undoubtedly a novelist of the first rank. Undoubtedly 
she would be overrated if she were put on a level with 
Richardson as an analyst of feeling, or Fielding as a 
humorist, or George Eliot as a scientific investigator of 
cause and effect in emotional changes, or any other 
novelist in the walk in which his special strength lies. 
But there are varities of excellence, all equally admirable 
of their kind, and Miss Burney was pre-eminent in her 
special kind, because she attempted only what she was 
qualified to perform. In her first two novels, "Evelina" 
and " Cecilia," there was nothing written against the 
grain simply because it was supposed to be the right 
thing for a novel ; she did not follow the fashion of her 
time in long-winded sentimental reflections or fine-spun 
analysis of feeling. The truth is that her writing, after 
her first four years of authorship, was a failure, because 
in " Evelina " and "Cecilia" she had exhausted all that 
was fresh in her observation of manners, and assumed 
thereafter a point of view that was not natural to her. 

The next pre-eminent work of fiction after Miss 



THE "MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO " 125 

Barney's novels was the " Mysteries of Udolplio," pub- 
lished in 1794, and also written by a woman. It was 
not a novel — a story of real life and character — but a 
romance. In the preface in which Horace Walpole had 
acknowledged the authorship of the "Castle of Otranto," 
while claiming the credit of having invented a new 
species of romance, he modestly admitted that he was 
sensible of his own inability to give full effect to his 
conception, and expressed a hope that he had paved the 
way for " men of brighter talents," superior to himself 
in the imagination and the exhibition of the passions. 
This good wish was not fulfilled for nearly thirty years, 
and was then fulfilled by a woman of brighter talents, 
Mrs. Radcliffe. She adopted Walpole's idea of giving 
the imagination freer play in the invention of incidents 
than the novelist could do if he kept to the manners of 
modern life. But she adopted his idea with an important 
difference as regarded the license of improbability that 
he allowed himself. It is curious to note how the license 
that Walpole sought for the imagination was gradually 
abridged by those who caught up his idea and followed 
in his track. The most successful of his imitators 
before Mrs. Radcliffe was another woman, Clara Reeve, 
a very industrious authoress, who produced what she 
called, after Walpole, a Gothic Romance, the "Old 
English Baron," in 1777. But Mrs. Reeve, though she 
owned him as a master, declined to be led by him in one 
particular ; she thought that he went too far with his 
supernatural improbabilities. Statues that drop blood, 
swords that take a hundred men to lift, pictures that 
t: groan and walk out of their frames, struck her as need- 
j . lessly wild inventions, calculated to shake the reader's 
11 faith in the story and give it a grotesque and ridiculous 
i air, such as a nursery tale has for a grown man. Accord- 
1 ingly Mrs. Reeve drew the line at ghosts. There is a 
haunted wing in the castle of the old English baron, and 
there is an heir wrongfully kept from his inheritance, 



126 THE NOVEL 

and brought up as a peasant's son ; but for the punish- 
ment of the wrong-doer, and tlie restoration of the 
defrauded youth to his own, the only supernatural 
machinery employed is the ghost of a murdered man. 
Thus far Mrs. Reeve abridged the license for the super- 
natural allowed by the authority of Walpole, and Mrs. 
Radcliffe imposed on herself a still stricter self-denying 
ordinance. She abjured the supernatural altogether, 
and yet contrived to keep her readers from first to hist 
in an atmosphere of mysterious excitement and super- 
stitious dread. There are no supernatural agents in her 
tales — neither wizard nor spectre ; every thing that 
happens is carefully explained as being due to natural 
causes ; yet we are kept in a nutter and fever of excite- 
ment as much as if evil spirits and good spirits were con- 
stantly at work around us. The situations are eerie ; she 
puts us in scenes where we are liable to the invasion of 
superstitious panic, in dark forests and lonety castles, with 
long echoing corridors and secret passages and rooms 
shut up because they are believed to be haunted ; she sur- 
rounds us with turbulent, desperate, unscrupulous char- 
acters. Unaccountable sounds are heard when our feel- 
ings are deeply interested in the fate of hero or heroine, 
voices where no speaker is visible, strains of music in 
lonely places where it seems all but impossible that any 
musician should be; there are unaccountable apparitions 
and marvellous disappearances. There is generally some 
mystery afloat ; when one has been cleared up, we are 
not suffered long to breathe freeh r before we are caught 
in the toils of another. Yet all the time only human 
agents are at work ; there is nothing improbable except 
the extraordinary combination of circumstances, nothing 
supernatural except in the superstitious imaginings of the 
personages of the story. Every thing that seemed as if 
it must be the work of spirits is careful ly and fully ex- 
plained as the story goes on. Mrs. Radcliffe has been 
censured for these explanations, as if they were a mis- 



MRS. EADCLIFFE DISCARDS THE SUPERNATURAL 127 

take in point of art, destroying the illusion and making 
us ashamed of ourselves for having been imposed upon. 
This censure I can regard only as an affectation, unless 
when it comes from a convinced believer in ghosts. 
Such persons might resent the explanation as casting 
doubts upon their cherished belief. But for other peo- 
ple I can see nothing that could be gained by leaving 
the mysterious incidents unexplained, except by the 
authoress, who would undoubtedly have saved herself 
an immense deal of trouble if she had made free use of 
ghosts and other supernatural properties, whenever she 
required them, without taking any pains to explain how 
the facts occurred. I read the story myself with a 
double interest ; I enjoy the excitement of superstitious 
wonder and awe while the illusion lasts, and when the 
mystery is cleared up, and the excitement is gently sub- 
siding, I am in a mood to get additional enjojmient from 
reflecting on the ingenuity of the complication that 
gave to the illusion for the moment the force of truth. 
Yet it was no less a person than Sir Walter Scott 
that set the fashion of objecting to Mrs. Radcliffe's 
explanations. If we were to enquire curiously into the 
objection, we should probably find that the enquiry led 
us into one of the differences between classical art and 
romantic art. Mrs. Radcliffe, although in the main a 
disciple in the school of romantic art, yet paid homage 
to classical art in her efforts to explain the strangest 
occurrences by accidents within the limits of human 
possibility ; and a thoroughgoing romanticist like Sir 
Walter Scott might be inclined to reprobate this con- 
cession. Yet one great leader of romantic art in France, 
George Sand, followed Mrs. Radcliffe's example, and in 
her " Consuelo " and " Comtesse de Rudolstadt" ac- 
counted for many strange and apparently supernatural 
occurrences by human agency. 

It was justly remarked by Mr. George Moir, in his 
treatise on Romance, that Mrs. Radcliffe has in later 



128 THE NOVEL 

times been most unjustly made to bear the sins of her 
imitators. "The truth is," he says, " that the sarcasms 
which have been directed against the puerile horrors 
of Mrs. Radcliffe ought justly to have been confined to 
the extravagances of her successors, who imitated her 
manner without either her imagination or her judgment, 
and conceived that the surest means of producing effect 
consisted in pressing the springs of the terrible as far as 
they would go. In the hands of these imitated imita- 
tors the castles became twice as large and ten times as 
perplexing in their architecture ; the heroine could not 
open an empty drawer without stumbling on a mys- 
terious manuscript written by her father or her mother ; 
nor leave her room to take a twilight walk, of which hero- 
ines are always strangely fond, without stumbling on 
a nest of banditti ; the gleam of daggers grew more 
incessant ; the faces of the monks longer and more 
cadaverous, and the visits of ghosts so commonplace 
that they came at last to be viewed with the same indif- 
ference by the reader as they were of old by honest 
Aubrey or less honest Dr. Dee." 



CHAPTER X 

THE NEW POETRY 
COWPER— HIS ALLEGED REVOLUTION OP POETRY 

In my last two lectures on the novels of the eigh- 
teenth century I tried to show you how much the 
public mind was occupied with this new kind of litera- 
ture. Poetry was for the time pushed aside. You will 
now, I trust, understand that it is a very inadequate 
explanation of the small amount of poetry that was 
written between Pope and Wordsworth, and of the 
poorness in quality of much of that small amount, to say 
that the poets of the period were hampered by a slavish 
subservience to classical models. There is abundance 
of evidence that would-be poets, on the contrary, 
strained after originality. Even before Pope died, 
Matthew Green, a poet of whimsical and dainty vein, 
who wrote with great sprightliness of humor and light- 
ness of touch, made it his boast that he was no imi- 
tator : 

" Nothing is stolen : my Muse though mean, 
Draws from the spring she finds within ; 
Nor vainly buys what Gildon sells, 
Poetic buckets for dry wells." 

The truth is that Pope's perfect success was not 
encouraging to imitators ; there was no chance of fame 
except in a different kind, and the mood of readers, 
delighted and fully occupied with prose fiction, was 
such as to chill poetic genius by the most blighting of 
all influences, indifference. The public was dancing to 
a different tune, and the poet sat silent with a feeling 

9 129 



130 THE NEW POETRY 

that he must pipe in vain. Now and again Poetry- 
made a violent struggle to get a hearing and a follow- 
ing, as when Churchill, the satirist, in the sixties of the 
century, throwing all the refinements of Queen Anne 
satire to the winds, laid about him with rude, furious, 
distempered force. He made a noise in his time, but 
when interest in the ephemeral subjects of his boisterous 
abuse and fierce invective had passed away, his verse 
had not sufficient intrinsic merit to command readers. 
Churchill certainly was no bigot to classical rules, no 
victim to smooth and easy couplets. The next poet to 
make a popular and enduring mark gained his readers 
by accommodating his verse to an easy, familiar, dis- 
cursive prose style, with which the great body of readers 
were for the time enchanted. 

It is usual to speak of Cowper as a " reformer of 
poetry, who called it back from conventionality to 
nature," and as the herald of Wordsworth and Byron. 
Universally this new movement is spoken of as a revolt 
against the authority of Pope ; and as it took place 
simultaneously with the French Revolution, or nearly 
so, this revolt is regarded as one of the signs of the 
revolutionary temper of the time. Now, there can be 
little doubt that the intense excitement and ferment 
produced by the French Revolution and the career of 
Napoleon affected the poetry of the time. But it gives 
an essentially wrong impression to speak as if the 
struggle of the French people with a corrupt aristocracy 
and royalty stimulated the poets of England to take up 
arms against their poetic tyrant, and depose him with 
anger and contumely. We can hardly speak of depos- 
ing a tyrant when there is no tyrant to depose. And 
it is the merest fiction, the most unsubstantial shadow 
of a metaphor, to describe Pope as tyrannizing over 
English poetry at the close of the eighteenth century. 
A poet can tyrannize only as the temporary viceregent 
of the poetic spirit, and the poetic spirit itself had no 



cowper's alleged reform of poetry 131 

dominion over the affections of the English people at 
this time. Pope's deposition had, in fact, been accom- 
plished by the coming to power of prose fiction. There 
had been a period of anarchy in poetiy; every poet had 
been doing that which was right in his own eyes, strug- 
gling desperately after something new, catching at 
straws like a drowning man, and there had been no poet 
of sufficient eminence to establish a general empire. 
There was nobody to revolt against when Wordsworth 
appeared ; the throne was vacant, open to any comer 
powerful enough to establish his right by poetic might. 
But Cowper, it is said, called poetry back from con- 
ventionality to nature. He pioneered Wordsworth in 
discarding the poetic diction sanctioned by the Queen 
Anne critics, their " heightened" expression, their vain 
endeavors to dress nature to advantage. That is to say, 
Cowper's diction is more like the language of prose. 
But was this a revolt against the tyranny of Pope ? It 
seems to me more accurate to describe it as a submission 
to the tyranny of the novel-writers and pleasant, dis- 
cursive prose-essayists. Cowper himself began his liter- 
ary cai-eer as an essayist and writer of light, trifling 
verses in the style of Prior and Green ; and it was by 
applying this same style to more serious subjects that 
he made a beginning in the so-called revolution. The 
worst of the revolution explanation of the great move- 
ment that Cowper is said to have heralded, an explana- 
tion so easy and simple and thought-saving, is that it 
! radically misrepresents the sources of the revolution, 
'and puts out of sight the real continuity of the literary 
i history of the eighteenth century. It would lead us to 
suppose that the simpler diction, the discursive method, 
'the prevalence of narrative b} r which the new poetry 
was characterized, were adopted out of antagonism to 
Pope ; whereas really the new poetry w r as enriched by 
the prose-essayists and novelists, as these had themselves 
'received benefits from the Queen Anne poets. There 



132 THE NEW POETRY 

had thus been a substantial gain in literature from 
generation to generation, and real progress, real develop- 
ment. It was not, as the revolution explanation would 
import, that the Queen Anne style had been discarded 
in the third or fourth generation as an entirely false 
ideal, as a wasteful venture in a wrong direction, an , 
unprofitable divergence from the true paths of imagina- 
tive literature. The prosemen of the middle forty ■ 
years of the century were helped by the brilliant epi- 
grammatic poets of the Queen Anne time; and the 
poets of the following generation received light and 
leading in their turn from the prosemen of the genera- 
tion before them. Cowper, the herald of Wordsworth, 
may perhaps be described as a reformer of poetry, but; 
it is more significant of his historical position to describe 
him as an essayist in verse. 

In the numerous biographical and critical sketches of 
Cowper, among which the latest, Mr. Goldwin Smith's: 
and Mrs. Oliphant's, may be mentioned as perhaps the! 
best, sufficient attention has not been paid to Cowper'si 
literary work in his early manhood, before his first mad- 
ness and his conversion to Evangelical Christianity, the 
events winch are rightly regarded as the mainsprings of 
the poetry now associated with his name, " Table Talk,", 
i" The Task," and the " Occasional Poems." The work 
of his early manhood, while he was still a buckish and 
briefless barrister, is generally mentioned ; but it isjj 
slurred over as if it were of no consequence in his his-' 
tory, as if it were a thing that had nothing in common 
with the productions of his regenerate days. It can he 
shown, I think, that, in so far as merely poetic qualities 
are concerned, this early work was quite as revolutionary 
or unrevolutionary as the poems of his pious old age. 

With the main outlines of Cowper's life you are, I 
dare say, familiar. He was the son of a country clergy- 
man, the grandson of a Justice of the Common Pleas, 
the grand-nephew of a Lord Chancellor. After passing 



COWPER CALLED TO THE BAR 133 

through Westminster School he was apprenticed to an 
attorney, and had as his fellow-apprentice the famous 
lawyer who afterward became Lord Thurlow. The 
youths spent their time, he tells us, "in giggling and 
making giggle," both in the attorney's office and in the 
house of Cowper's uncle, where dwelt a cousin with 
whom he was in love. Emancipated from the attorney's 
office, and called to the bar, Cowper took chambers in 
the Temple, and lived a gay and idle life, trusting to 
family influence for a sinecure, and doing no sort of 
work in his profession. It was during this period that 
he wrote the poetry and prose which has, I think, been 
unduly neglected in dissertations on his career. He be- 
longed to a literary set. Two of his Westminster school- 
fellows, Bonnel Thornton and Colman the dramatist, 
conducted for two years (from January, 1*754, to Septem- 
ber, 1756) a very popular periodical in the style of the 
Spectator, the Connoisseur. Cowper was an occasional 
contributor. The gayety of these young Templars may 
be judged from the fact that seven of the old West- 
minster boys formed a coterie, to which they gave the 
name of the Nonsense Club, in which the fun of giggling 
and making giggle was continued. There Cowper lived 
till he reached the age of thirty-two, when a long- 
expected sinecure, in the gift of his kinsman Major 
Cowper, was ready for his occupancy. This was the 
clerkship of the Journals of the House of Lords. 
There wei'e two sinecures in Major Cowper's gift, and 
it would seem that, through some indecision or change 
of purpose on the poet's part, suspicion was aroused 
about the nominee, and it was resolved that he should 
be examined as to his competency before the bar of the 
House of Lords. Cowper was horror-struck at the 
prospect ; fiddled excitedly for some months with 
preparations for the ordeal ; then on the day before 
'attempted to commit suicide, and was found to be out 
of his mind. It is idle to speculate upon the causes of 



134 THE NEW POETRY 

this catastrophe. Madness is often puzzling to the most 
skilful doctors, making enquiry at the time and in full 
possession of minute circumstances that we desire in 
vain to know in a historical case. Mere fright at a pub- 
lic examination would not have driven Cowper mad if 
he had had no predisposition to madness. But a small 
circumstance may suffice to upset a man of nervous, sus- 
ceptible, irresolute temperament, when his natural feeble- 
ness of will has been increased by want of occupation,! 
and his health deranged by want of exercise. The only j 
premonitory symptoms of Cowper's madness is found in j 
a poem, written nine years before the catastrophe (in 
1754), in which he speaks of being driven to poetry 

"to divert a fierce banditti 
(Sworn foes to everything that's witty) 
That with a black infernal train, 
Make cruel inroads in my brain, 
And daily threaten to drive thence 
My little garrison of sense." 

" The fierce banditti which I mean," he adds, " are 
gloomy thoughts led on by spleen." The spleen in 
those days was the supposed physical source of hj'po-j 
chondria ; a melancholy and despondent person was said 
to be suffering from the spleen. Matthew Green wrote 
a poem on the spleen, and the banishment of its depress- 
ing influence by wholesome laughter : 

" To cure the mind's wrong bias, Spleen, 
Some recommend the bowling-green ; 
Some hilly walks ; all exercise ; 
Fling but a stone, the giant dies. 

" Laugh and be well. Monkeys have been 
Extreme good doctors for the Spleen ; 
And kitten, if the humour hit, 
Has harlequiu'd away the fit. " 

Unfortunately Cowper was too much frightened at the 
prospect of appearing before the Lords to take the excel-! 



cowper's madness and recovery 135 

lent advice of his favorite poet. lie was confined for 
eighteen months in a lunatic asylum, where his reason 
was restored, it would seem, by such a judicious regimen 
as might have averted the malady if it had been employed 
in time. 

Cowper returned to sanity, strange to say, in a blaze 
of religious rapture. His physician, Dr. Cotton, was a 
pious man, a writer of hymns, and used to hold religious 
conversations with his patients — an ill-advised thing, as 
Mr. Gold win Smith remarks, if Cowper's madness had 
been religious mania. In the poet's case religion was 
not the malady, but an element in the cure. One morn- 
ing in the summer of 1765, after a visit from his brother, 
he rose with a new sense of health ; at breakfast on the 
bright summer morning felt still better ; on a sudden 
impulse took up the Bible, from which he had shrunk 
in dull despair during his illness, and all in a moment 
was filled with an ecstatic conviction that he had made 
his peace with God and was again in his right mind. 
In Cowper's tender, sensitive, dependent spirit, with an 
imagination ever running swiftly toward intolerable 
horrors, and a will much too feeble of its own strength 
to arrest this tendency, the doctrines of Evangelical 
Christianity found a congenial subject. It was one of 
those instantaneous conversions which Wesley and his 
disciples believed to be a moment in the history of every 
true believer. The doctor was at first suspicious of this 
sudden change in his patient, but his doubts were soon 
removed. Cowper had really recovered, and found in 
his ecstatic faith the stay and support that his depen- 
dent spirit required. 

It is doubtful whether the recovery would have been 
permanent, — it was never permanent in the sense of being 
securely fixed against accident, but it is doubtful whether 
it would have been as permanent as it was, — had not a 
ifortunate chance thrown him in the way of the Unwin 
family when he was discharged from the asylum. Mrs. 



136 THE NEW POETRY 

Unwin was a woman born to be the support of such a 
man : gentle in her way, so as never to wound his 
tenderly fastidious taste ; unaffectedly pious, so as to 
comfort him in his doubts and fears, and confirm his 
ecstasies with the sweetness of her sympathy ; yet with 
all this of a cheerful temper, and always ready to laugh 
with a hearty genuine ring at the sallies of his exuberant 
humor. There never was a more perfect compatibility 
of temper. Mr. Unwin was alive when they first met, 
and the poet was admitted as a lodger into their par- 
sonage ; but they continued to live together at Olney 
after his death, Mrs. Unwin tending him and humoring 
him with unfailing gentleness and self-sacrifice. There 
was no thought of marriage between them ; their love 
was not the love of lovers. Much has been written, and 
not a little insinuated, about the relationship between 
Cowper and Mrs. Unwin ; but I think Mrs. Oliphant is 
right in her interpretation of the poet's character, that 
he belonged to a class of men celibate by nature, born 
to be dependent on the tender ministrations and affec- 
tionate companionship of women, yet as near as may be 
devoid of passion. Mrs. Unwin was seven years older 
than the poet, and neither her son, with whom he cor- 
responded, nor his relatives, who were greatly pleased 
with the happiness he had found, seem ever to have 
dreamed of regarding the gentle rescued lunatic as a 
dangerous lover. 

Much less fortunate for Cowper was his relationship! 
with an overwhelming Evangelical enthusiast, Mr. New- 
ton, the vicar of Olney, the converted captain of a 
slaver. It was at his instance that Mrs. Unwin and the 
poet settled at Olney, to be near him. He took posses- 
sion of them after Mr. Unwin's death, and no priest ever 
exercised authority with more arbitrary confidence. 
Occupation was what Cowper wanted, and Mr. Newton 
found him occupation in regular spiritual exercises, in 
visiting the sick in body and in mind, and in writing: 



INFLUENCE OF MRS. UNWIN 137 

hymns. For some time Cowper was happy in the voca- 
tion thus found for him, but the strain was too much ; his 
mind again gave way, and for five years he remained 
moody, dejected, and full of capricious insane fancies. 
Gentle Mrs. Unwin found for him during this period an 
occupation in which he took a childish delight, making 
chairs and tables for her, and cages, baskets, and hutches 
for his pets, of whom he collected a great number about 
him, having at one time "five rabbits, three hares, two 
guinea-pigs, a magpie, a jay, and a starling ; besides 
two goldfinches, two canary birds, and two dogs." 
When the long fit passed off, Mr. Newton again set him 
to work upon l^'inns, and the " Olney Hymns " were 
published in 1779, fourteen years after the poet's first 
recovery. 

I mention this period to show you how long the poet 
was in finding his true vocation — the employment in 
which he enjoyed a full measure of happiness. " I never 
received a little pleasure in my life," he once said ; " if 
I am delighted, it is always in the extreme." His letters 
show that under Newton's dictatorship he was often 
happy, but it was by fits and starts. It was a fortunate 
thing for him when this strenuous spiritual director left 
Olney, and could overawe him only by letter. Not long 
after his departure Mrs. Unwin, with her quiet pene- 
trating insight, devised an employment for him in which 
he found four years of unclouded happiness. She had 
observed that he was never so completely drawn away 
from himself as when he was writing, and in the 
November of 1780 she suggested to him that he should 
attempt a poem of some length, and gave him as a sub- 
ject the " Progress of Error." The poet "was now in 
his native element, not perfectly suited with a subject, 
but still more at libert}^ to indulge his quick imagina- 
tion than he could have been in the composition of 
hymns. He set to his new employment with delight, 
and produced in quick succession the " Progress of 



138 THE NEW POETRY 

Error," "Table Talk," "Truth," "Expostulation," 
" Hope," " Charity," " Conversation," and " Retirement." 
Mr. Newton from a distance expressed doubts about the 
new departure, but the poet pacified him with the idea 
that his verses might be the means of attracting to the 
true faith some whom the truth in its naked severity 
was apt to repel. Wesley chose lively popular airs for 
his hymns, on the principle that it was not well that the 
devil should have all the best tunes ; and Newton 
apparently tolerated Cowper's moral satires, as he called 
them, from a similar motive. 

The "Moral Satires" were published in 1782, and 
were rather coldly received by the critics. It was 
otherwise with his next publication, a work begun under 
a different influence, an influence that was like a renew- 
ing of the poet's youth. The casual reader who has 
heard in a vague way of Cowper's relations with devoted 
women generally coi^les Mrs. Unwin and Lady Austen 
together as two pious Methodist ladies who sacrificed 
themselves to cheer the gentle poet's melanchoh^. But 
the two women were very different in character, and 
the poet's acquaintance with the one had a very different 
course from his acquaintance with the other. The one 
by her patient, forbearing, sympathetic companionship 
did most for his happiness ; the other in a brief angel's 
visit did most for his reputation. Mrs. Unwin was his 
household friend and slave for more than thirty years ; 
Lady Austen was his gay and sparkling playfellow for 
less than three. Lady Austen's settlement in Olney 
was a bright interval in Cowper's long residence there, 
which, with all his fitful Evangelical enthusiasm, he 
could not help feeling to be a monotonous imprisonment 
when he remembered the bustling variety of his ten 
years' life in the Temple. He spoke of Olney after she 
left, and after she awakened his memories of other days, 
as a " moral Bastille." She was a woman of the world, 
very different from the quiet Puritanic country clergy-! 



LADY AUSTEN'S INFLUENCE OTST COWPEE 139 

man's wife ; the widow of a baronet, who had lived 
much in Paris, handsome, vivacious, full of talk and 
high spirits. "She is a lively, agreeable woman," Cow- 
per wrote to Newton immediately after his first inter- 
view with her — lie had chanced to see her shopping in 
Olney with her sister, one of Mrs. Unwin's few intimates 
in the place, and had requested Mrs. Unwin to ask her 
to tea. " She has seen much of the world, and accounts 
it a great simpleton, as it is. She laughs and makes 
laugh, and keeps up a conversation without seeming to 
labor at it." Lady Austen was charmed with the poet, 
and the poet was charmed with Lady Austen. She 
brought back to him breezy sketches of the world from 
which he had so long been secluded. She romped with 
the playful old boy of fifty, playing battledore and 
shuttlecock with him, while Mrs. Unwin played on the 
harpsichord. She told him diverting stories, among 
others the adventure of John Gilpin, which kept him 
awake with laughter for a whole night, and for which he 
rewarded her by turning it into verse. But above all,, 
his " Moral Satires " being now completed and published, 
she suggested to him that he should write a poem in 
blank verse, and when he asked her for a subject, 
laughingly named the sofa on which she sat. This was 
the origin of the series of poems called the "Task," 
composed in a much gayer and more discursive mood 
than the " Moral Satires." 

-I It was the " Task " that made Cowper's reputation, 
*and it was inspired by a revival, under Lady Austen's 
companionship, of that more mundane spirit to which 
ihe had long been a stranger. This alone would make it 
worth while to look back and see what his writing was 
like while he was still a young " buck," as the phrase 
then went, living in chambers in the Temple, and gig- 
gling and making giggle at his uncle's house in South- 
ampton Row. We have seen what the Methodist spirit 
ilid for him. It inspired the " Olney Hymns" and the 



140 THE NEW POETRY 

" Moral Satires," and neither of these performances 
made the great world outside the Evangelical circle feel 
that a new poet had arisen in England. This achieve- 
ment was reserved for the " Task," written during the 
temporary resuscitation of a half -disused way of look- 
ing at the world, written in a gayer mood, and therefore 
it is of interest to look at the tone and style of Cowper's 
first writing, before he came under Methodist influence. 
Cowper contributed three papers to the Connois- 
seitr, in March, April, and May, 1756, Nos. Ill, 115, 119. 
If we did not know that they were Cowper's, they 
would strike us as extremely clever and idiomaticalty 
written imitations of Addison, the great exemplar of 
periodical essayists at the time. Knowing that they are 
Cowper's, and induced thereby to scrutinize them more 
closely, we have no difficulty in detecting the peculiar 
note of playfully extravagant humor with which we are 
familiar in the " Task." The first of the papers is an 
absurd description of "the delicate Billy Suckling, the 
contempt of the men, the jest of the women, and the 
darling of his mamma " — a picture of an impossible 
young milksop who fancies himself a buck. Neither 
then nor afterward was Cowper capable of drawing 
human character from life ; his uncontrollable sense of 
fun pushed him into comic exaggerations that seem 
rather silly to people less easily tickled. The fun of the 
second paper, a letter from an old bachelor, Christopher 
Ironside, describing his persecution by young ladies, is 
equally extreme, but not so obvious ; and may, perhaps, 
be taken as throwing some light on the kind of romp- 
ing that went on between Cowper and his cousins in 
Southampton Row : 

"The female part of my acquaintance entertain an odd opinion 
that a Bachelor is not in fact a rational creature ; at least, that lie 
has not the sense of feelin»' in common with the rest of mankind ; 
that a Bachelor may be beaten like a stockfish ; that you may 
thrust pins into his legs, and wring him by the nose ; in short, I 



LETTER PROM AN OLD BACHELOR 141 

that you cannot take too many liberties with a Bachelor. I am 
at a loss to conceive on what foundation these romping philoso- 
phers have grounded their hypothesis, though at the same time 
I am a melancholy proof of its existence, as well as of its ab- 
surdity. 

" A friend of mine, whom I frequently visit, has a wife and 
three daughters, the youngest of which has persecuted me these 
ten years. These ingenious young ladies have not only found out 
the sole end and purpose of my being themselves, but have 
likewise communicated their discovery to all the girls in the 
iteighbourhood ; so that if they happen at any time to be apprised 
of my coming (which I take all possible care to prevent) they 
immediately despatch half a dozen cards to their faithful allies, 
to beg the favour of their company to drink coffee and help tease 
Mr. Ironside. Upon these occasions my entry into the room is 
sometimes obstructed by a cord, fastened across the bottom of the 
door-case ; which, as I am a little near-sighted, I seldom discover 
till it has brought me on my knees before them. While I am 
employed in brushing the dust from my black rollers, or chafing 
my broken shins, my wig is suddenly conveyed away." 

In the last of these papers there are comic descriptions 
of the behavior of various characters when in possession 
of a secret — all in the same strain of simple, childlike 
exaggeration. At this period Cowper scribbled a great 
deal more than he printed. These three papers in the 
Connoisseur are specimens of the early practice by 
which he acquired the mastery of comic description 
that appears occasionally in the " Task " — the abundance 
of detail, and the felicity of phrase. It was in writing 
prose essays and prose letters that Cowper acquired 
the copious, easy, familiar diction that entitles him to 
rank with poetic reformers. Cowper is often referred 
to as an example of a man whose fancy and imagination 
blossomed late in life, because he was fifty before he 
acquired reputation as a poet. That a man much tried 
by physical suffering should, in the evening of his days, 
take up his pen and write poetry with a serious purpose, 
trying thereby to catch trifles which could not be 
caught in any other way, has a look as of inspiration. 



142 THE NEW POETRY 

This, no doubt, has contributed to perpetuate the delu- 
sion. But it will not bear examination. Cowper not 
only wrote prose with exquisite grace and skill in his 
youth, but his manner as a verse-writer was also fully 
formed before he was thirty. At the age of seventeen 
he wrote some work, — heroic blank verse in imitation of 
Philips's " Splendid Shilling," — that shows, even in the 
opinion of Southey, the same character as the blank 
verse of the "Task," written when he was more than 
fifty. That he read little poetiy, in fact, confined his 
reading to Milton after his first attack of madness, is 
unduly insisted on, if the meaning is to prove that his 
poetry came fresh out of a mind unacquainted with 
what had been done before, and consequently having 
no relation with preceding literature. It must be re- 
membered that Cowper was thirty-two before madness 
first overtook him, and that all through his early 
manhood he led a life of perfect leisure, his only 
employment being to read and write for his own 
amusement. 

Very soon after the " Task " was completed Cowper 
lost the pleasant company of the "fair" who had 
" commanded " it. A certain mystery hangs over the 
cause of Lady Austen's sudden departure from Olney. 
There was obviously some disturbance in the harmony 
of the happy family, and there has been much specula- 
tion as to the cause. " What else was to be expected ? " 
many people ask. Mrs. Unwin naturally became jealous 
of Cowper's attentions to her gay and fashionable rival, 
and he, having to choose between them, was bound in 
honor to stand by his lifelong companion and nurse. 
No other result was to be expected when two women 
were attached to one man. This is the easiest explana- 
tion, but it has the defect of not suiting what we know 
of the characters of the three persons concerned. 
Strange to say, or rather it would be strange to say if 
we were not aware of the extent to which men of repu- 



LADY AUSTEN LEAVES OLXEY 143 

tation are idolized, nobody has thought of putting any 
of the blame on the poet, if blame there was in the mat- 
ter. The rupture must have been brought about either 
by Lady Austen's grasping eagerness to have more 
than her fair share of the poet's attentions, or by Mrs. 
Unwin's unreasonable jealousy. It seems to me much 
more likely that the coolness which led to Lady Austen's 
departure arose between Cowper and herself, and that 
the long-suffering, patient Mrs. Unwin had nothing to 
do with it ; that it was not strained relations between 
the two ladies, but strained relations between one of 
them and the poet, that broke up the alliance. Whether 
Lady Austen was in love with Cowper or not is a ques- 
tion we have no means of deciding. It is not unlikely. 
Men incapable of feeling passion themselves may not be 
incapable of inspiring passion in others. Lad}^ Austen 
afterward married a Frenchman of letters, M. de Tardiff, 
and Cowper, though much older than her, being fifty 
when she made his acquaintance, besides being a poet, 
had a boyish playfulness of temper and a quickness of 
wit not without their charm. Whether in love with him 
or not, Lady Austen certainly sought his society, though 
a great liking for the ministrations of Mr. Scott, the 
curate, was her ostensible reason for taking a house in 
Olney. Now, Cowper, though gentle, affectionate, and 
playful, would seem to have had his full share of the 
invalid's fretful, exacting, and capricious selfishness, 
and it is quite conceivable that Lady Austen, by no 
means so patient and self-denying a woman as Mrs. 
Unwin, may simply have tired of his exactions and 
caprices. If we read between the lines of one of his 
letters to his cousin, Lady Hesketh, this explanation is 
almost forced upon us. " On her first settlement in our 
neighborhood," Cowper writes, " I made it my own 
particular business (for at that time I was not employed 
in writing, having published my first volume and not 
begun my second) to pay my devoirs to her ladyship 



144 THE NEW POETRY 

every morning at eleven. Customs very soon become 
laws. I began the ' Task,' for she was the lady who 
gave me the Sofa for a subject. Being once engaged 
in the work, I began to feel the inconvenience of my 
morning attendance. We had seldom breakfasted our- 
selves till ten ; and the intervening hour was all the 
time I could find in the whole day for writing, and oc- 
casionally it would happen that the half of that hour was 
all that I could secure for the purpose. But there was 
no remedy. Long usage had made that which was at first 
optional a point of good-manners, and consequently of 
necessity, and I was forced to neglect the ' Task ' to at- 
tend upon the Muse who had inspired the subject. But 
she had ill health, and before I had quite finished the 
work was obliged to repair to Bristol." The sprightly 
Muse, with all her stability of temper, sense of religion, 
and seriousness of mind, must soon have become disa- 
greeably conscious of the difference between the forced 
attendance of a wayward and irritable invalid with his 
thoughts elsewhere, and the effusive camaraderie with 
which he sought her company in the bright days of 
their first companionship. 

" O Love ! it is a pleasant thing 
A little time, while it is new." 

Mrs. Unwin might not have resented the change, but 
Lady Austen was not Mrs. Unwin, and she " repaired 
to Bristol." We might have understood the cause of 
the separation better if the lady had kept Cowper's 
letter of farewell, but she was so dissatisfied with it 
that she threw it in the fire — tempted, perhaps, for once 
in her life, to believe that Methodism was cant. Lady 
Austen was too exacting, or Cowper was too exacting ; 
anyhow, they could not get on together — any explana- 
tion you please except that Mrs. Unwin was jealous. 
To entertain this explanation for a moment is to commit 



LADY AUSTEN LEAVES OLNEY 145 

the most senseless outrage on the memory of a gentle, 
gelf-denying woman who bore with all the crazy poet's 
selfish whims and caprices, and watched over him with 
more than a mother's love till her own mind gave way 
under the strain. 



10 



CHAPTER XI 

SCOTTISH POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

THE ELEVATION OF A DIALECT INTO A LITERARY LANGUAGE- 
INFLUENCE OF OLD BALLADS — WATSON'S "COLLECTION " — ALLAN 
RAMSAY — THE EASY CLUB — "THE GENTLE SHEPHERD" — 
SONG- WRITERS — SKINNER, ETC. — FERGUSSON — BURNS 

If the eighteenth century was a comparatively barren 
period in English poetry, it was otherwise in Scotch 
poetry. It Avitnessed in Scotland an extraordinary 
phenomenon, the elevation of a dialect by the genius of 
one man to a place among literary languages. 

People have almost ceased wondering that a ploughman 
should have proved himself capable of great work in 
literature, but it is still customary to speak of Burns as 
an uneducated man. Now, we may lay it down as an 
axiom that, whenever a man does great work of any 
kind, he has been specially educated for it, if not by the 
deliberate care of parents or his own deliberate choice, 
by a still greater school-master, Accident. When we 
find any apparent exception to this rule, we may be sure 
that there is something wrong with our conception of 
education. Burns is an apparent exception only when 
we take education to mean instruction in school and 
college. But this course of instruction has never yet 
been in our country a literary education, an education 
for the man of letters. It has been at best but an 
education for certain professions and for a scholarly 
career. Neither school nor college, as they were in the 
days of Burns, could have contributed one iota to his 
efficiency as a poet. For his work as a poet he had 
received from early youth the best possible education. 

146 



SCOTTISH POETRY BEFORE BURNS 147 

I mean as regards the purely technical or literary quali- 
ties of his verse. As regards the feelings that he 
expressed, the character that is reflected in his poetry, 
though the feelings are in the main healthy and the 
character in the main noble, we may think that circum- 
stances might have been a more perfect school-master. 
But his literary education was as perfect as could be 
desired. What a poet above all needs is an easy com- 
mand of the language in which he writes, and the early 
training of Burns was excellently fitted to give him 
this. 

For two generations before Burns wrote there had 
been throughout Scotland an unbounded enthusiasm for 
song-writing in the native dialect. The movement 
began early in the century among a knot of idle lairds, 
younger sons, and Writers to the Signet in Edinburgh ; 
but in the course of a very short time it became universal 
throughout the country. Men and women of all ranks 
took part in it, from the bold, black-eyed, lucky Isabel 
Pagan, who kept an alehouse in Ayrshire, to the accom- 
plished Lady Anne Lindsay, daughter of the Earl of 
Balcarres. Judges of the Court of Session, scions of 
noble houses, ministers, farmers, gardeners, shepherds — 
no one thought himself too high to condescend or too 
humble to aspire. All were ambitious of trying their 
hand at a rhyme in the vernacular. There is no example 
in history of a literary movement so widely diffused, 
perhaps because up to that time there had been no 
example of a whole people through all its ranks educated 
to read and write. Miscellany after miscellany poured 
from the press collecting the effusions of the wonderfully 
miscellaneous herd of writers ; and these collections 
were conned in moorland bothies and kitchen firesides 
as ardently as in libraries and drawing-rooms. It was 
in this school that Burns received the literary education 
that fitted him for his work in life. He was nourished 
on two generations of poetry ; taught by its mistakes, 



148 SCOTTISH POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

warned by its affectations, inspired by its enthusiasms, 
stimulated by its successes. He had a large body of 
literature before him in the same kind that he attempted ; 
in this he was steeped to the lips. But how was the 
unlettered ploughman to distinguish between good and 
bad ? In this his own strong sense, clearness of insight, 
and warm passionate nature kept him right. He applied 
with merciless, unfaltering severity one touchstone, — 
commonplace enough, in words at least, to the critics of 
the time, — truth to nature. Pope's praise of Nature : 

"Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, 
One clear, unchanged, and universal light, 
Life, force, and beauty must to all impart 
At once the source and end and test of Art " — 

a eulogy that Burns had by heart — was accepted and 
applied by him to the letter. And in applying this test 
of truth to Nature to enable him to distinguish between 
good and bad, genuine and affected, in the work of his 
predecessors, and to guide him in the execution of his 
own, the peasant had a decided advantage over men of 
higher social rank, because the nature that the Scotch 
poets of the eighteenth century sought to interpret was 
rustic nature. It was no wonder that a ploughman 
bore off the laurel crown from all competitors in this 
keen race for poetic fame. Who but a real country 
swain was to be expected to be supreme in pastoral 
lyrics? The songs of Burns would have been much 
more miraculous if he had been any thing but a plough- 
man. 

Akin to the vulgar error of wondering at Burns as 
an uneducated poet is the error of regarding Scotch 
vernacular poetry as purely indigenous, a growth out of 
the hearts of the people, gradually perfecting itself and 
taking shape unaffected by any influence from without. 
Between the reigns of James VI. and Queen Anne there 
was no poetry of note written in Lowland Scotch. It 



REVIVAL OF SCOTTISH POETRY 149 

had its roll of distinguished names while the Jameses 
reigned in Scotland — the first James himself, Henryson, 
Dunbar, Lindsay, Montgomery ; but it ceased to be a 
literary language when the Court was removed from 
Holyrood. The poets went with the Court ; the sing- 
ing birds with the hands that caressed and fed them, 
the hearts that were cheered and the fancies that were 
humored with their songs. For a hundred years the 
Muse of Scotland was mute. Immediately after the 
union of the kingdoms there was a revival of poetry in 
the Lowland Scotch. That this revival was fostered 
by the growing prosperity of the country, and the rise 
of a new class of wealthy patrons, is highly probable ; 
but it is a very common opinion that the new growth 
of fancy and imagination which these men encouraged 
was entirely spontaneous, uninfluenced either by the 
earlier Scotch poetry or by the poetry of the southern 
centre of civilization ; that it was the offspring of the 
teeming fancies of unsophisticated men, innocent of 
any literature but the Bible and the Shorter Catechism. 
The error is natural enough, if we think of the 
Scotch poetry of the eighteenth century as peasant 
poetry, written by peasants for peasants, artless jets of 
song, most of them rude, imperfect, disfigured by make- 
weight epithets and make-shift rhymes, an irregular and 
uneven stretch of poetry, redeemed from ephemeral 
insignificance only by the semi-miraculous genius of 
one of the peasant poets. None the less is it an error 
to regard this poetry as of entirely spontaneous genera- 
tion. If it is worth writing about, it is worth enquiring 
into ; and when we enquire closely into its beginning, 
we see that, like all the literary growths, it had its seed- 
time as well as its harvest. The seeds of the new poetic 
vegetation which so rapidly overspread the country 
came from the old Scotch poetry of the sixteenth cen- 
tury, and as it grew slips were grafted on it from plants 
that were flourishing at the time in the poetic gardens 



150 SCOTTISH POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

of England. In plain language, poetry was revived in 
Scotland by reprints of the old Scotch poetry, and the 
new Scotch poets studied the English poets and critics. 
and in the first instance at least translated into theii 
vernacular and applied to their own circumstances the 
ideas that they found in their approved masters. The 
truth is that the peasant poetry of Scotland, so far 
from being spontaneous in the sense of being uncon- 
ditioned by previous literature, is one of the few- 
unambiguous and decided examples of the influence of 
critical ideas on creative literature. 

The leader of the poetic revival in Scotland was Allan 
Ramsay, but the work that marks the beginning of 
better da} r s was Watson's " Collection of Choice Scots 
Songs, Ancient and Modern," published in 1706, when 
Ramsay was a young man of twenty. He had been 
bred in the country, or near Hopetoun Mines in Lanark- 
shire, of which his father was manager ; but his father 
dying when he was a child, and his mother marrying 
again, he had been sent to Edinburgh at the age of 
fifteen, and apprenticed to a wigmaker. Watson's 
" Collection " was the first poetry lie read. He was 
charmed with it ; took to repeating snatches of it ; and 
from humming it over began to feel an impulse to 
make verses himself. It Mas- thus that the ingenious 
wigmaker received his first impetus : 

" Then emulation did me pierce, 
Whilk ne'er since ceased." 

Soon after chance threw him in the way of more i 
learned amateurs, and brought him into the full stream 
of Queen Anne literary influences. There were modern 
as well as ancient poems in Watson's "Collection." 
Among the ancient pieces were Dunbar's " Thistle and 
Rose," and the humorous poem of which the author- 
ship is disputed between James I. and James V., 
f * Christ's Kirk on the Green." Among the modern 



RAMSAY AND THE EASY CLUB 151 

contributors was William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, the 
"Willie " who, according to the song, was a " wanton 
wag," a roistering young Jacobite lieutenant, who 
formed himself apparently on the poetic ideal of the 
Restoration — a Scotch Etherege or Rochester. The 
young wigmaker made his acquaintance, probably in 
the way of business ; but on the basis of their common 
interest in poetry the acquaintance became more inti- 
mate, and Ramsay was admitted a member of a club to 
which Hamilton belonged along with other choice spirits 
of literary leanings and Jacobite political faith. The 
fact that Ramsay, though his family had come down in 
the world, could ti'ace his descent from a younger son 
of an Earl of Dalhousie probably helped, along with his 
social and poetic gifts, to secure him admission to this 
Easy Club, as it was called. That the Easy Club, which 
was broken up by the Rebellion of 1715, had a literary 
as well as a political basis is shown by the circumstance 
that the members of it assumed fancy literary names ; 
and the bent of Ramsay's literary homage at the time is 
indicated by his choice for himself of the name of Isaac 
Bickerstaff, then famous as Steele's pseudonym in the 
Taller. Ramsay made himself so popular in the Easy 
Club that he was appointed its Poet-Laureate, and by a 
formal minute adjudged "a gentleman." 

Through these Jacobite gentlemen, Ramsay's friends 
and patrons of the Easy Club, with leanings to the good 
old times of the Stuarts, and a disposition to scoff at 
Puritans as their natural and hereditary enemies, the 
spirit of the Restoration passed into the peasant poetry of 
Scotland to do battle with the austere spirit of the Kirk. 
It is a striking illustration of the vitality of ideas and 
their directive power over conduct that the Cavalier 
ideal, transmitted through Ramsay, took possession of 
the warm temperament of Burns, and worked out in 
him the incontinent irregularities that made shipwreck 
of his life. Ramsay himself was too cool of temper to 



152 SCOTTISH POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

be made a victim in like manner ; convivial, quick- 
witted, libertine enough in theory, a welcome guest at 
the drinking-bouts then fashionable, ever ready to help 
in driving dull care away with a jest or a song, he was 
yet sufficiently master of himself to combine poetry 
with an eye to business. He prospered as a wigmaker ; 
he set up as a bookseller ; he published two poetical 
miscellanies by which he made some money. He had 
none of Burns's overscrupulous and fantastic objection 
to taking pa}'ment for his songs ; he published them in 
broad sheets as he wrote them ; and it is said to have 
been a custom with the good wives of Edinburgh to 
send one of their children with a penny for Allan 
Ramsay's latest. " Renowned Allan, canty callan," was 
described by a sour critic as a "convivial buffoon"; 
but, though he ruined himself late in life by building a 
theatre which the magistrates would not allow him to 
open, he was, like his contemporary Pope, a good man 
of business. Ramsay's own conduct was not mastered 
by the ideal of reckless generosity and self-indulgence 
to which he gave expression in his poems ; but none the 
less he had great influence in connecting poetry with 
ostentatious and swaggering profligacy in the minds of 
the peasant poets of Scotland. 

The pleasure loving side of Ramsa3 r 's temperament 
was encouraged and expanded by his connection with 
the Eas}' Club ; and it was in this connection also that 
in all probability he received the suggestion of the work 
that is his only enduring title to fame — " The Gentle 
Shepherd." We have no positive evidence that he con- 
ceived fully the idea of writing such a work at this 
time — the memoirs of his life are exceedingly scanty ; 
but it is all but certain that he was at this time put on 
the road that led him to this pastoral poem — the first 
genuine pastoral poem that had appeared in European 
literature between the time of Theocritus, in the third 
century b. c, to the eighteenth century. This conclu- 



ARTICLES IN THE " GUARDIAN " 153 

sion is irresistible when we look at the chief events in 
English literature during the three years of Ramsa} r 's 
membership of the Easy Club. He was a member of 
the Club from 1712 to 1715. The kind of poetry that 
was most in vogue at the time was pastoral poetry. 
We have already seen how general had been the discus- 
sion of this kind of poetry for some years. During the 
existence of the Easy Club interest in the topic had 
received a fresh stimulus from the publication of Pope's 
" Windsor Forest," and Ambrose Pliilips's " Pastorals." 
For the purpose of puffing Philips and depreciating 
Pope there was a series of articles on Pastoral Poetry 
in the Guardian which doubtless were read by Isaac 
Bickerstaff's double in the Easy Club. Every-body 
who had any pretension to literary fashion read Steele 
and Addison's periodicals, and the members of the Easy 
Club were keen and ardent amateurs of poetry, not a 
little self-conscious of poetic ambition. To puff Philips 
and depreciate Pope was the prime purpose of these 
articles in the Guardian, and this purpose was cleverly 
defeated by the stratagem of the poet whose reputation 
was in danger ; but unintentionally and by the way the 
articles served a more important purpose — namely, 
guiding Allan Ramsay into a kind of poetry exactly 
suited to his talents. One of the papers in the Guardian 
reads now like a recipe for Allan Ramsay's great pas- 
toral ; " The Gentle Shepherd " might be said to have 
been made from it as from a prescription, so exactly 
in the scheme and accessories does the poet follow the 
advice of the critic. " Paint the manners of natural 
rustic life," said the critic to the poet, " not the man- 
ners of artificial shepherds and shepherdesses in a ficti- 
tious golden age ; use actual rustic dialect ; instead of 
satyrs and fauns and nymphs, introduce the supernatural 
creatures of modern superstition." This is what the 
essayist in the Guardian advised, and what Ramsay 
with happily appropriate genius did. I know no other 



154 SCOTTISH POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

instance in literature where a poet has carried out the 
ideas of a critic so perfectly. Ramsay pottered for a 
little with pastoral dialogues of the old artificial school, 
in which he made Steele and Pope discourse in the 
character of shepherds about the deaths of Addison and 
Prior — a fancy rendered all the more absurd by his mak- 
ing these two shepherds discourse in the Scotch dialect. 
But he soon abandoned these affectations, and produced 
his drama of real rustic life in 1*725. Its repute was 
instantaneous and widespread. Edition after edition 
was produced; it was said that " The Gentle Shepherd " 
was almost as common a book in the houses of the 
Scotch peasantry as the Bible. Amateur companies 
were organized in country parishes to act it. Even to 
this day, it is said, such companies exist and perform 
occasionally in the south of Scotland. The fame of 
" The Gentle Shepherd " spread beyond Scotland ; it 
probably furnished the hint of "The Beggar's Opera " to 
Gay ; so that if Ramsay owed something to the critical 
ideas of his English contemporaries, he may be said to 
have repaid the debt. 

The songs interspersed through " The Gentle Shep- 
herd," which is rather an operetta than a drama, are 
not the best part of it. I cannot say that I think 
highly of Ramsay's gifts as a song-writer. His 
genius was not lyrical. His songs, even the best 
'of them, strike me as smirking and affected, entirely 
destitute of genuine l} r ric rapture. We have only to 
place his " Auld Lang Syne," or his " Nanny O," by 
the side of Burns's words to the same airs to feel 
how empty they are of lyric sincerity and force, how 
artificially, mechanically, and laboriously they have 
been put together. 

" How joyfully my spirits rise, 
When dancing she moves finely — ; 
I guess what heaven is by her eyes, 
Which sparkle so divinely — O. 



ramsay's lack of the lyric art 155 

Attend my vow, ye gods, while I 
Breathe in the bless'd Britannia, 
None's happiness I shall envy, 
As long's ye grant me Nanny — O." 

— Ramsay. 

"Her face is fair, her heart is true, 
As spotless as she's bonny — O; 
The opening gowan, wat wi' dew, 
Nae fairer is than Nanny — O. 
Come weel, come woe, I care na by, 
I'll tak' wliat Heaven will sen' me, O; 
Nae ither care in life have I 
But live and love my Nanny — O ! " 

— Burns. 

The inferiority of Ramsay is still more manifest 
when we look at his " Auld Lang S} 7 ne." The opening 
lines have a ring of insincerity that pervades the whole 
song : 

" Should auld acquaintance be forgot, 

Tho' they return with scars ? 
These are the noble hero's lot, 

Obtained in glorious wars. 
Welcome, my Varo, to my breast, 

Thy arms about me twine, 
And make me once again as blest 

As I was lang syne." 

There are two lines in Ramsay's " Farewell to Lochaber " 
that seem to be conclusive against his claim to a respect- 
able place among song-writers. A soldier bidding fare- 
well to his sweetheart is a well-chosen lyrical theme ; 
Ramsay had abundance of poetical intelligence, and is 
often liappy in his choice of themes. And the opening 
lines, when sung to the beautiful air, are undeniably 
simple and touching : 

"Fareweel to Lochaber, fareweel to my Jean, 
Where heartsome wi' thee I hae mony days been." 



156 SCOTTISH POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

But presently come the two lines which strike an ab- 
surdly false note, and turn the plaintive soldier into a 
burlesque impostor : 

' ' These tears that I shed they are a' for my dear, 
And no for the dangers attending on weir." 

Fancy a departing soldier explaining that he weeps not 
because he is afraid of the enemy, but because he is 
sorry to leave his sweetheart ! Qui s'excuse, s'accuse. 
The girl, if she had a particle of spirit, would have 
laughed, and set him down at once as a transparent 
humbug. No man capable of writing a good song with 
any deep sentiment or passion in it could have passed 
such a preposterous insincerity as that. No; " renowned 
Allan, canty callan," had not the lyric gift. His strength 
lay in humorous description and portraiture ; in arch, 
sly, " pawky" fun. The portrait of him by his son is a 
speaking likeness of the poet as we know him through 
his works ; it is a keen, slyly humorous face, the face of 
a man with a quick sense of the ridiculous, and a firm 
touch in the exhibition of what amuses him, but it is 
not the face of a lyric poet. 

If we except the songs, which, as I have said, are of 
rather unequal merit, we cannot but admire the manner 
in which Ramsay embodied the idea so casually sug- 
gested by the English critic. As is usually the case in 
such matters, several places are claimants for the honor 
of being the scene of the poem, but probably Newhall 
in Peeblesshire conforms most to the poetic descriptions. 
The plot is slender, but not more so than we should 
expect in such an operetta, and the scenes are connected 
with no little dramatic skill. The bulk of the story nar- 
rates the pastoral loves of Roger and Jenn}', and of 
Patie, the Gentle Shepherd, and Peggy, a shepherd's 
niece. Sir William Worthy, a somewhat priggish but 
not unamiable knight, is the presiding genius ; in Patie 
he recognizes his son, and in Peggy his niece, and the 



"the gentle shepherd" 157 

faithful lovers receive his blessing. Bauldy, Madge, 
and Mause supply what comic element there is, but the 
humor is of a quiet, subdued order, never approaching 
the rollicking fun of Burns. The light, bantering con- 
versation between Peggy and Jenny is admirably done, 
and the spirited eulogy of Patie by his sweetheart is a 
good example of the style of language that Ramsay con- 
sidered most suited to a Scottish pastoral : 

" Sic coarse-spun thoughts as thae want pith to move 
My settled mind, I'm o'er far gane in love. 
Patie to me is dearer than my breath ; 
But want of him I dread nae other skaith. 
There's nane of a' the herds that tread the green 
Has sic a smile, or sic twa glancing een. 
And then he speaks with sic a taking art. 
His words they thirle like musick thro' my heart. 
How blythly can he sport, and gently rave, 
And jest at feckless fears that fright the lave! 
Ilk day that he's alane upon the hill, 
He reads fell books that teach him meikle skill. 
He is — but what need I say that or this ? 
I'd spend a mouth to tell you what he is ! 
In a' he says or does there's sic a gait, 
The rest seem coofs compar'd to my dear Pate. 
His better sense will lang his love secure ! 
Ill nature hefts in sauls that's weak and poor." 

In a prologue for " The Gentle Shepherd " on the occa- 
sion of one of its presentations on the stage the poet 
declared : 

" Tho' they're but Shepherds that we're now to act 
Yet, gentle audience, we'd not ha' ye mistake 
And think your entertainment will be rude. 
Most men and all the ladys think it good ; 
Our Pastoral Author thinks so too, but fears 
The diction may offend some nicer ears. 
This we regard not, therefore will proceed 
To act the blithsome life that shepherds lead." 

Now, it is just this fact, that Allan Ramsay did not 
"regard" those "nicer ears," that constitutes his main 



158 SCOTTISH POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

literary importance. He is worthy to be called the 
pioneer of Burns, because he had the sense and ability 
to combat victoriously the theory of men like Beattie, 
who held that the Scottish language was incapable of 
being made the vehicle of literary expression. 

Half a century elapsed between the publication of 
"The Gentle Shepherd "and the boyhood of Burns, and 
meantime the impulse given by Ramsay and the inge- 
nious gentlemen and ladies who co-operated with him in 
his publications had diffused itself all over the country. 
We had our group of singers here in the North : George 
Halket, the author of "Logie o' Buchan"; Alexander 
Ross, the author of the "Fortunate Shepherdess"; 
Priest Gedcles, author of " Lewie Gordon " and the 
"Wee Wifiekie"; and greatest of them all, indeed, one 
of the greatest of Scotch song-writers, John Skinner, 
the author of "Tullochgorum," and the "Ewie wi' the 
Crookit Horn." In " Tullochgorum," especially, there 
is a wonderful rapidity and spirit in its music — an 
indefinable something that manifestly proclaims Skinner 
to be the fellow-countryman of William Dunbar and 
Burns : 

" What needs there be sae great a f raise 
Wi' dringing dull Italian lays ? 
I wadna gie our ain Strathspeys 

For half a hunder score o' 'em. 
They're dowf and dowie at the best ; 

Dowf and dowie, dowf and dowie, 

Dowf and dowie at the best, 
Wi' a' their variorum ; 
They're dowf and dowie at the best, 
Their allegros and a' the rest ; 
They canna please a Scottish taste, 

Compar'd wi' Tullochgorum." 

These are lines that, both for their music and their sen- 
timent, were likely to appeal to Burns, and it is no sur- 
prise, therefore, to find Burns writing words so laudatory 



POETICAL ASPIRATIONS OF BURNS 159 

as these : " I regret, and while I live I shall regret, that, 
when I was in the North, I had not the pleasure of 
paying a younger brother's dutiful respect to the author 
of the best Scotch song ever Scotland saw — ' Tulloch- 
gorura's my delight.' There is a certain something in 
the old Scotch songs, a wild happiness of thought and 
expression, which peculiarly marks them, not only from 
English songs, but also from the modern efforts of song- 
wrights in our native manner and language. The only 
remains of this enchantment, these spells of the imagina- 
tion, rest with you." 

It is remarkable that the Northern song-writers were 
all educated men, — in the popular sense of the word 
educated, — school-masters and clergymen. In the south 
of Scotland poetic ambition was more universal. Then 
the middle years of the eighteenth witnessed something 
like the palmy days of the Troubadours of Provence in 
the thirteenth century, when every hamlet had its 
laureate. We cannot wonder that the genius of Burns 
should have been excited by such surroundings, and 
that very early in life falling in love, and knowing of 
neighboring bards who addressed verses to the objects 
of their affections, he was moved by an ambition to 
show that he also was a song-writer. Thousands of 
little bards at that time limited their aspirations to fame 
within the parishes in which they were born. That the 
ambition of Burns took a wider range was due partly to 
the masterful strength of his nature — that, of course, is 
an indispensable condition of wide-reaching ambition ; 
but partly also to peculiar circumstances in his life that 
fostered his ambition and kept it from being quenched 
in his hard struggle for bare existence as the son of a poor 
farmer. Where other young men in his rank of life, like 
young men with a turn for versification in higher ranks 
of life, were eager only to gain the admiration of the 
women, and establish a reputation for cleverness with 
the men among whom they were born, Burns from a 



1G0 SCOTTISH POETEY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

very early period aspired to make the streams of his 
native country as famous as the classic Ilissus and the 
silver-winding Thames : 

"E'en then a wish, I mind its power, 
A wish that to its latest hour 

Shall strongly heave my breast ; 
That I for poor auld Scotland's sake, 
Some useful plan or book could make, 

Or sing a sang at least ;" 

and again in a poem showing more definitely the latitude 
of his ambition : 

" Ramsay and famous Fergusson 
Gied Forth and Tay a lift aboon ; 
Yarrow and Tweed, to monie a tune, 

Owre Scotland rings ; 
While Irwin, Lugar, Ayr, and Doon, 

Naebody sings. 

" Th' Ilissus, Tiber, Thames, and Seine, 
Glide sweet in monie a tunef u' line ; 
But, Willie, set your fit to mine, 

And cock your crest, 
We'll gar our streams and burnies shine 

Up wi' the best ! " 

And the natural greatness of mind that prompted this 
ambition was not without special influences to keep the 
flame alive. Had Burns been educated as other local 
rhymers were, he might have remained, like them, con- 
tent with local fame, ignorant of the great world out- 
side, hungering for no applause beyond his own small 
circle, because he was unaware of any thing more to be 
desired. But the education of Burns was different from 
that of other local rhymers, and had carried him to 
spiritual altitudes, the views from which were bounded 
by a much wider horizon. 

In common with all the other young men of the time, 
rich and poor, Burns had the advantage for a poet of 



HOW BURNS PRODUCED HIS SONGS 161 

living in a poetical atmosphere ; but he had the further 
special advantage of coming under personal influences 
that helped powerfully to give his work the quality of 
greatness. His want of school and college instruction 
was fully compensated by the exceptional tastes, abilities, 
and literary interests of his father and his school-master. 
We may truly say, I think, that for his special training 
as a poet, for the literary part of it, that is to say, the 
happiest accident of his life was his contact with Mr. 
Murdoch, who, when a youth of eighteen, was employed 
by William Burness, and one or two of his neighbors, 
to teach their children. That this young school-master 
was a man of no ordinary vigor, flexibility, and breadth 
of interest was shown by his subsequent career. He 
went to London, and made a living as a teacher of 
French, an extraordinary feat for a young country 
Scotchman ; and gained such repute as a teacher, 
though he ultimately ruined his prospects by intemper- 
ate habits, that at one time he had as a pupil in English 
no less a person than M. Talleyrand. We can hardly 
overestimate the lift above provincial commonplace that 
was given to the future poet by his contact with a man 
of such activity and range of mind. Mr. Murdoch was 
greatly attracted by the character of William Burness, — 
for so the father spelled his name, — and, attracted also by 
the character and abilities of the boys, he took a warm 
interest in them, and gave an unusual turn to the read- 
ing of the family, introducing them to authors not ordi- 
narily within the knowledge of a peasant's household. 
Robert Burns was but a small boy when Murdoch was 
enaraffed as a teacher to the combined families ; but 
when he was a youth of fifteen or sixteen, the young 
man chanced to be appointed English teacher in the Ayr 
Academy, and the elder Burness, always eager to get 
education for his sons, sent Robert for a short time to 
board with him. Charmed with the aptness of his pupil, 
with his manly character, his enthusiasm for knowledge, 
11 



162 SCOTTISH POETBY IN THE EIGHTEEETH CENTURY 

and his powerful grasp of intellect, Murdoch did his 
utmost to give a bent to his studies. It was only for a 
short three weeks that Burns could be spared from the 
work of the farm, where he was already doing the 
work of a man ; but during that time, so eager was the 
pupil to learn, and so willing was the master to com- 
municate, that, as Murdoch afterward stated, he and 
his boarder were hardly a moment silent — the one enquir- 
ing, the other answering and expounding. Among other 
things Murdoch gave him a start in learning French to 
such effect that Burns afterward by himself acquired 
such a knowledge of the language that he was able to 
read it with ease. He was rather proud, in fact, of the 
accomplishment, and fond of airing scraps of French in 
his correspondence. But this knowledge of French was 
the least of the benefits Burns derived from this inspir- 
ing and stimulating teacher. 

Looking at his life till he was twenty-two or twenty- 
three, we find from a memorandum-book which he kept 
the extent of his reading, and we may safely say that 
there were very few young men at that time in any 
rank whose acquaintance with the poets of the previous 
century was so great. He had read most of the English 
poets, including Shakespeare, Pope, Shenstone, Allan 
Ramsay, and collections of Scotch songs ; and he not 
only read them, but pondered over them. His habit 
was always to carry a book in his pocket, in which way 
he is said to have worn out two copies of Mackenzie's 
"Man of Feeling." This gives us a clue to his mode of 
mental application. He took a rigorously critical atti- 
tude. We can imagine him reading over his songs, then 
turning the work over in his mind and judging with his 
perfect taste whether it was true to nature. Burns was 
wont to take his own songs to pieces ; word by word, 
line by line, stanza by stanza, all passed under review, 
and wei - e critically pronounced on by their author. 
Thene could be no greater misconception than to regard 



HOW BURNS PRODUCED HIS SONGS 163 

Burns as an uneducated poet. This idea has made ship- 
wreck of many a promising poet, or at least of many a 
youth capable of becoming a pleasing versifier, for they 
get the idea that it is derogatory to poetic genius to 
take intellectual labor over their verses. They are under 
the idea that Burns produced songs without considering 
whether they were good or bad. We ma}' be sure that 
no amount of genius will produce perfect art, unless the 
man of genius will bestow intellectual labor on it. A 
perfect poem, such as many of Burns's lyric gems are, 
can no more be written without labor than can a statue 
be carved out of stone. 



CHAPTER XII 

WORDSWORTH 

CONNECTION WITH PREVIOUS POETRY — SKETCH OF LIFE — LYRICAL 
BALLADS 

From the phrases that are generally used about nine- 
teenth-century poetry, one would expect to be conscious 
of a great and sudden change in passing into it out of 
the poetry of the eighteenth century. Were the new 
poets not inspired with the spirit of the French Revo- 
lution ? Did they not rise in their might, glowing with 
a noble spirit of independence, and fling the poetic 
traditions of their fathers to the winds ? Pope with 
his mechanical couplets, his passion for epigrammatic 
condensation, his fear of going beyond classical example, 
was sitting on poetry like a nightmare when the French 
Revolution broke out ; and the English Muse, fired by 
this great modern example of insubordination, would 
bear him no longer, cast off her old Man of the Moun- 
tain, and roamed greatly, daring wherever Fancy or 
Imagination tempted, with all the fearless ardor of new- 
found liberty. Such is the language in which the new I 
movement is often spoken of, and if we accept it liter- ! 
ally, we should expect to find somewhere between the 
old poetry and the new a sudden discontinuous break ; 
we should expect, as we followed the history of our 
literature, to encounter all of a sudden the signs of a : 
great and complete transformation such as might be 
made on the face of nature by an earthquake or a 
deluge. But no such catastrophic spectacle is pre- 
sented to the historic eye. A great change took place, 
but it was an easy, gradual transition, a quiet evolution 

164 



GRADUAL REVOLUTION IN TASTE FOR POETRY 165 

of new tilings, not a fierce upheaval and sweeping away 
of old things as worthless rubbish, and a triumphant 
reconstruction upon entirely new lines. We must not 
ignore the fact that there was a change because we can- 
not put our finger upon the exact moment when the 
change occurred ; but it is equally unhistoric to be mis- 
led by the character of the tremendous political event 
of the time into ascribing a similar character to the 
grand new season of poetry that opened with the nine- 
teenth century. 

The hold of the Queen Anne style on literature, as 
we have seen, relaxed gradually; the sentiments that 
it embodied gradually palled from custom on the class 
for whom Pope wrote ; longings for new excitements 
gradually made themselves felt ; and gradually also the 
class whose taste had dominated Queen Anne literature 
lost their supremacy in the world of art. The prosemen 
of the last sixty years of the century were, as I have 
already indicated, the chief literary agents of the trans- 
formation that gradually evolved itself, year by year, 
ten years by ten years, now moving quickly, now moving 
slowly. The novelists and the romancers educated the 
taste of the public for new subjects and for a new style ; 
for subjects of more various human interest, and a style 
less condensed and elaborate, more free and discursive. 
Pope's readers had little taste for romantic marvels or 
for domestic pathos ; the romancers and the novelists 
accustomed the public to such imaginative food, and so 
prepared the way for Scott and Wordsworth. Even the 
Byron ic spirit had its prototype in prose. 

Wordsworth's preface to his "Lyrical Ballads" in 
1798 is a great landmark in the history of poetry, because 
it woke people up to a consciousness of the change that 
had taken place, and compelled critics to define their posi- 
tion in the face of that change. This preface, and the 
volume with which it is connected, we must consider at 
length ; but in the first place let us look at Wordsworth's 



166 WORDSWORTH 

early life, and at the poems written by him before the 
" Lyrical Ballads." In these early poems we shall see 
how gradual was his transition from the poetic style of 
his predecessors, notwithstanding the revolutionary note 
of his famous preface. 

To some of Wordsworth's admirers it might appear a 
sort of sacrilege to try and trace the growth of his poetic 
style, because he has himself in the " Prelude" written 
his poetic autobiography. "The Growth of a Poet's 
Mind " is the sub-title of this wonderful poem, in winch 
flashes of poetic rapture are so strangety mixed with 
prosy moralizings and pragmatic dogmas about education. 
Seeing that the poet has given the history of his own 
mind, it is to his worshippers as final as the Koran to a 
good Mohammedan ; and any presumptuous attempt to 
add to it might be treated by them as the books in the 
Alexandria Library were treated by the Caliph Omar. 
They might say: If your essay contains any thing not 
to be found in the " Prelude," it is wrong ; if it con- 
tains what is already to be found there, it is superfluous. 
But it is possible to go beyond the revelation of the 
" Prelude " without contradicting it or merely bringing 
to light what is useless and superfluous. It is the growth 
of his mind, of his feelings, of his impassioned love for 
Nature, that is there recorded ; not the growth of his 
poetic art, of his aims and methods as an artist, and 
these are interesting to us if we wish to see him in his I 
right relations with his predecessors. His early poems 
furnish more valuable clues for this enquiry than the 
" Prelude," which is rather an imaginative interpreta- ' 
tion of his youth than a literal record. And we have 
other clues besides in his singularly matter-of-fact prose 
notes on the circumstances in which he composed his 
early poems. 

The chief incidents in Wordsworth's early life were 
taken down from his own dictation. He was the son of j 
one of Sir James Lowther's land-agents, whose head- ' 



Wordsworth's early life 167 

quarters were at Cockermoutli, and of the daughter of 
a mercer in Penrith. His early boyhood till the age of 
nine was spent partly at Cockermoutli and partly at 
Penrith, both beautifully situated little towns in Cum- 
berland. From nine to seventeen he was at a boarding- 
school in Hawkshead, another romantically situated 
little town in the north of Lancashire. His mother died 
when he was seven years old, and his father when he 
was thirteen ; but his uncle, in whose guardianship he 
was left, although Lord Lonsdale had borrowed all his 
father's money and refused to pay it back, — the repay- 
ment not being made till the old lord's death many 
years afterward, — his uncle kept both him and his brother 
at school, and sent them both to Cambridge, the poet 
entering in 1787, his seventeenth year. Wordsworth 
took his degree in 1791, travelled for some time in 
France and Italy, lived for a few years in London, 
thought of the Church as a profession, thought of 
journalism as a profession, but finally decided to retire 
to his native valleys and live on his small inheritance, 
devoting his days to "plain living and high thinking." 
He was nearly thirty when he took this determination, 
and he persevered in it to the end of his days in 1850, 
with the addition to his means of plain living of a Com- 
missionership of Stamps in 1813, and a pension of three 
hundred pounds in 1842. 

Such is the bare outline of Wordsworth's life. What 
were the ruling circumstances that co-operated with in- 
born genius to make him the poet that he was ? Read 
the "Prelude " and you will find that his own answer is 
simply Nature — the mountains and the mists, and the 
leaping sounding cataracts of the valleys where he lived 
in youth. This is how he describes his feelings in his 
school-days at Hawkshead : 

" I would walk alone 
Under the quiet stars, and at that time 
Have felt whate'er there is of power in sound 



168 WORDSWORTH 

To breathe an elevated mood, by form 
Or image unprofaned ; and I would stand, 
If the night blackened with a coming storm, 
Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are 
The ghostly language of the ancient earth, 
Or make their dim abode in distant winds. 
Thence did I drink the visionary power ; 
And deem not profitless those fleeting moods 
Of shadowy exultation ; not for this, 
That they are kindred to our purer mind 
And intellectual life ; but that the soul, 
Remembering not, retains an obscure sense 
Of possible sublimity, whereto 
With growing faculties she doth aspire, 
With faculties still growing, feeling still 
That whatsoever point they gain, they yet 
Have something to pursue." 

And again : 

" 'Twere long to tell 
What spring and autumn, what the winter snows, 
And what the summer shade, what day and night, 
Evening and morning, sleep and waking, thought 
From sources inexhaustible, poured forth 
To feed the spirit of religious love 
In which I walked with Nature. But let this 
Be not forgetten, that I still retained 
My first creative sensibility ; 
That by the regular action of the world 
My soul was unsubdued. A plastic power 
Abode with me ; a forming hand, at times 
Rebellious, acting in a devious mood ; 
A local spirit of his own, at war 
With general tendency, but, for the most, 
Subservient strictly to external things 
With which it communed. An auxiliar light 
Came from my mind, which on the setting sun 
Bestowed new splendour ; the melodious birds, 
The fluttering breezes, fountains that run on, 
Murmuring so sweetly in themselves, obeyed 
A like dominion, and the midnight storm 
Grew darker in the presence of my eye : 
Hence my obeisance, my devotion hence, 
And hence my transport. 



NATURE'S INFLUENCE ON WORDSWORTH 169 

Nor should this, perchance, 
Pass unrecorded, that I still had loved 
The exercise and produce of a toil, 
Than analytic industry to me 
More pleasing, and whose character I deem 
Is more poetic as resembling more 
Creative agency. The song would speak 
Of that interminable building reared 
By observation of affinities 
In objects where no brotherhood exists 
To passive minds. My seventeenth year was come ! 
And, whether from this habit rooted now 
So deeply in my mind, or from excess 
In the great social principle of life 
Coercing all things into sympathy, 
To inorganic natures were transferred 
My own enjoyments ; or the power of truth 
Coming in revelation did converse 
With things that really are, I, at this time, 
Saw blessings spread around me like a sea. 
Thus while the days flew by, and years passed on, 
From Nature and her overflowing soul, 
I had received so much that all my thoughts 
Were steeped in feeling : I was only then 
Contented, when with bliss ineffable 
I felt the sentiment of Being spread 
O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still ; 
O'er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought 
And human knowledge, to the human eye 
Invisible, yet liveth to the heart ; 
O'er all that leaps and runs, and shouts and sings, 
Or beats the gladsome air ; o'er all that glides 
Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself, 
And mighty depth of waters." 

At Cambridge he attended little to the studies of the 
place. " He began residence at seventeen," says Mr. 
Myers, " and his northern nature was late to flower. 
There seems, in fact, to have been even less of visible 
promise about him than we should have expected ; but 
rather something untamed and insubordinate, some- 
thing heady and self-confident ; an independence that 



170 WORDSWORTH 

seemed only rusticity, and an indolent ignorance which 
assumed too readily the tones of scorn." But his mind 
was not idle : 



" Oft when the dazzling show no longer new 
Had ceased to dazzle, ofttimes did I quit 
My comrades, leave the crowd, buildings and groves, 
And as I paced alone the level fields 
Far from those lovely sights and sounds sublime 
With which I had been conversant, the mind 
Drooped not ; but there into herself returning, 
With prompt rebound seemed fresh as heretofore. 
At least I more distinctly recognised 
Her native instincts : let me dare to speak 
A higher language, say that now I felt 
What independent solaces were mine, 
To mitigate the injurious sway of place 
Or circumstance, how far soever changed 
In youth, or to be changed in after years. 
As if awakened, summoned, roused, constrained, 
I looked for universal things ; perused 
The common countenance of earth and sky : 
Earth, nowhere nnembellished by some trace 
Of that first Paradise whence man was driven ; 
And sky, whose beauty and bounty are expressed 
By the proud name she bears — the name of Heaven. 
I called on both to teach me what they might ; 
Or, turning the mind in upon herself, 
Pored, watched, expected, listened, spread my thoughts 
And spread them with a wider creeping ; felt 
Incumbencies more awful, visitings 
Of the Upholder of the tranquil soul, 
That tolerates the indignities of Time, 
And, from the centre of Eternity 
All finite motions overruling, lives 
In glory immutable. But peace ! enough 
Here to record that I was mounting now 
To such community with highest truth — 
A track pursuing, not untrod before, 
From strict analogies by thought supplied, 
Or consciousnesses not to be subdued. 
To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower, 
Even the loose stones that cover the highway, 



HIS ABSORPTION IN NATURE 171 

I gave a moral life : I saw them feel, 

Or linked them to some feeling : the great mass 

Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all 

That I beheld respired with inward meaning. 

Add that whate'er of Terror or of Love 

Or Beauty, Nature's daily face put on 

From transitory passion, unto this 

I was as sensitive as waters are 

To the sky's influence in a kindred mood 

Of passion ; was obedient as a lute 

That waits upon the touches of the wind. 

Unknown, unthought of, yet was I most rich — 

I had a world about me — 'tw T as my own ; 

I made it, for it only lived to me, 

And to the God who sees into the heart." 

Now, how were the poet's sensibilities thus keenly 
awakened to the glories and the beauties of Nature ? 
What first made him alive to the joy of poring over 
every shade of color, every minute variation of form in 
natural tilings, and seeking in them, with never-ending 
satisfaction, images of human life in its manifold rela- 
tions ? And what influences governed his expression of 
what he saw and felt? The "Prelude "is silent on 
these points. It merely chronicles the phases of his 
delight in looking and imagining. There was in "Words- 
worth to the last not a little of that untamed rustic 
egotism which Shakespeare caricatured in Holofernes 
and Sir Andrew Aguecheek ; the egotism which, owing 
to slight contact with other human beings, is never tired 
of contemplating the strangeness of its own moods. 
" I am a fellow of the strangest mind in the world," 
said Sir Andrew, and in these words expressed an 
undying characteristic of the isolated man who seldom 
makes comparison of his own mind with the minds of 
his fellow-creatures. Wordsworth's distinction lay not 
in what he felt, but in the play of his imagination on 
what he felt. He magnifies the strangeness of his 
absorption in Nature by representing it as a mysterious, 
inexplicable feat, originating he knew not how, but 



172 WORDSWORTH 

present with him from his earliest years, and gaining no 
strength but from its own impetus. " The ' Prelude ' 
is a work of good angary for human nature," Mr. Myers 
says, in commenting on the poem. " We felt in reading 
it as if the stock of mankind were sound. The soul 
seems going on from strength to strength by the mere 
development of her inborn power." The "Prelude" is 
a noble poem, but this particular feature of it I should 
consider a weakness, and not a strength. No man can 
stand alone ; the aspiration to do so is as inhuman as 
the achievement is impossible. The soul that seeks to 
isolate itself from its fellows must infallibly harden 
and wither. 

When, however, we turn to his early poems, and to 
his prosaic notes and illustrations of them, we can see 
clearly enough the continuity of his descent from the 
great poets who had written before him. 

The "Evening Walk "and the "Descriptive Sketches" 
were published in 1793. Commenting many years after- 
ward on the couplet : 

"And fronting the bright west, yon oak entwines 
Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines," 

he says : " This is feebly and imperfectly expressed ; 
but I recollect distinctly the veiy spot Avhere this first 
struck me. It was on the way between Hawkshead and 
Ambleside, and gave me extreme pleasure. The moment 
was important in my poetical history ; for I date from 
it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural 
appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of 
any age or country, so far as I was acquainted with 
them; and I made a resolution to supply in some degree 
the deficiency. I could not at that time have been above 
fourteen years of age." There was more, then, than 
mere disinterested delight in the poet's contemplation 
of Nature ; mingled with that delight was a poet's 
ambition, and the joy of having found an untrodden 



HIS POETICAL MASTERS 173 

track. And lie did not qualify himself for this self- 
imposed mission by mere indolent gazing and dreamy 
pursuit of the thick-coming fancies that crowded his 
mind, while his eye drank in what Nature presented to 
him. If the " Prelude" had been intended as a plain 
historical narrative of the growth of a poet's mind, it 
would have been strange that he does not mention in 
the description of his Cambridge life an incident that 
connects him with the poet Gray. He studied Italian 
then, and his teacher was Gray's friend. It was not, 
however, from the Italian poets that he caught the 
rhythm of his early style. You will have no difficulty 
in detecting his poetical masters if I read you a passage 
or two from the " Evening Walk " and the " Descriptive 
Sketches " : 

" Sweet are the sounds that mingle from afar, 
Heard by calm lakes, as peeps the folding star, 
When the duck dabbles 'mid the rustling sedge, 
And feeding pike starts from the water's edge, 
Or the swan stirs the reeds, bis neck and bill 
Wetting, that drip upon the water still ; 
And heron, as resounds the trodden shore, 
Shoots upward, darting his long neck before. 
Now, with religious awe, the farewell light 
Blends with the solemn colouring of night ; 
'Mid groves of clouds that crest the mountain's brow, 
And round the west's proud lodge their shadows throw, 
Like Una shining on her gloomy way, 
The half-seen form of Twilight roams astray ; 
Shedding, through paly loopholes mild and small, 
Gleams that upon the lake's still bosom fall ; 
Soft o'er the surface creep those lustres pale, 
Tracking the motions of the fitful gale. 
With restless interchange at once the bright 
Wins on the shade, the shade upon the light. 
No favoured eye was e'er allowed to gaze 
On lovelier spectacle in faery days." 

Or again : 

" Once, Man entirely free, alone and wild, 
Was blest as free — for he was Nature's child. 



174 WORDSWORTH 

He, all superior but his God disdained, 
Walked none restraining, and by none restrained, 
Confessed no law but what his reason taught, 
Did all he wished, and wished but what he ought. 
As man in his primeval dower arrayed 
The image of his glorious Sire displayed, 
Even so, by faithful Nature guarded, here 
The traces of primeval Man appear ; ,, 
The simple dignity no forms debase ; 
The eye sublime, and surly lion-grace : 
The slave of none, of beasts alone the lord, 
His book he prizes, nor neglects his sword ; 
Well taught by that to feel his rights, prepared 
With this ' the blessings he enjoys to guard.'" 

The former of these passages reminds one of Gold- 
smith as forcibly as of Pope, but in the latter Pope 
alone is clearly the model. There is an evident effort 
after balance and condensed expression, but it is not 
executed with nearly the perfection and terseness of the 
Popian couplet. The imitation is, however, sufficiently 
apparent to be well worth noting as an interesting link 
between the two poets. 

Wordsworth's next publication was the " Lyrical 
Ballads," in 1798. The volume was published in con- 
junction with Coleridge. Coleridge visited Words- 
worth in the summer of 1797, when he bad resided with 
his sister at Racedown in Dorsetshire. By this time 
Wordsworth had written his poem " Guilt and Sorrow" 
in the Spenserian stanza ; his tragedy of " The Bor- 
derers"; and the description of the "Ruined Cottage." 
I mention these poems because it is a significant fact 
that every poem written by Wordsworth up to the time 
of Coleridge's visit, while the} r show considerable poetic 
power, gave little indication of distinctive individual 
genius. This visit seems to have had a wonderfully 
quickening and awakening effect on Wordsworth's 
nature. The two young men were charmed with one 
another, and Wordsworth removed to Alfoxden in 



THE "lyrical ballads" 175 

Somersetshire to enjoy his friend's companionship. 
During the year that followed he produced much, and 
what he produced bore a distinctive mark, as if the 
radiant, restless vitality of the more variously gifted 
man had stirred his more sluggish northern nature to it,s 
depths, stimulated him to put forth his full powers, and 
made him feel in the exercise of them a confident sense 
of mastery. It may truly be said that Wordsworth 
hardly knew what was in him till the companionship of 
Coleridge widened the horizon of his aims. 

The volume published at Bristol in 1798 contained 
Coleridge's " Ancient Mariner"; the rest of the volume 
was by Wordsworth. In the authorized edition of his 
works no chronological order is followed ; they are 
classified according to subjects ; and it is important, if we 
would understand the controversy that has been raised 
round Wordsworth's name, that we should pick out and 
read together the poems that were published together in 
1798. "We are Seven" is now included among the 
"Poems referring to the period of Childhood " (No. x) * 
"The Complaint"" (21), "The Last of the Flock" (22), 
"The Idiot Boy" (31), and " Her Eyes are Wild " (37), 
among the " Poems Founded on the Affections "; "The 
Reverie of Poor Susan" (13), "The Thorn" (23), 
" Lines above Tintern Abbey " (26), among " Poems of 
the Imagination"; "Expostulation and Reply" (1), 
" The Tables Turned " (2), " To my Sister " (5), and 
"Simon Lee" (6), among "Poems of Sentiment and 
Reflection "; " Goody Blake and Harry Gill," among 
" Miscellaneous Poems." 

When these poems are read together, we begin to 
understand why such a shout of derision was raised by 
the critics against the " L3 T rical Ballads," and why they 
impressed so deeply those who were not repelled by 
their strangeness. The poet's personality was power- 
fully expressed in them, and he was a markedly differ- 
ent kind of person from any that had before presented 



176 WORDSWORTH 

himself as a poet. His humor was a strange kind of 
humor, and his seriousness ran in an unusual vein, and 
humor and seriousness were strangely intermixed. The 
public found subjects that they were accustomed to con- 
sider too vulgar and common for poetry treated appar- 
ently with pathetic intention, but in so grotesque a way 
as only to make them laugh at the attempt on their 
tender feelings. There was, indeed, one poem in the 
volume, the "Lines written above Tintern Abbey," in 
which a fresh theme was handled with a power that 
nobody could be insensible to. If all had been like 
this, the acknowledgment of Wordsworth's greatness 
would not have been checked and held back by astonish- 
ment at the grotesque strangeness of the lyrical ballads, 
to which the title of the volume challenged special 
attention. This was the poem in which he first gave 
expression to his impassioned worship of Nature : 

" Five years have past ; five summers, with the length 
Of five long winters ! and again I hear 
These waters, rolling from their mountain springs 
With a soft inland murmur. — Once again 
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, 
That on a wild secluded scene impress 
Thoughts of more deep seclusion ; and connect 
The landscape with the quiet of the sky. 
The day has come when I again repose 
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view 
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, 
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, 
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves 
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see 
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines 
Of sportive wood run wild ; these pastoral farms, 
Green to the very door ; and wreaths of smoke 
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees ! 
With some uncertain notice, as might seem 
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, 
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire 
The Hermit sits alone. 



"lines written above tintern abbey" 177 

These beauteous forms, 
Through a long absence, have not been to me 
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye : 
But oft in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din 
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them 
In hours of weariness sensations sweet, 
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart ; 
And passing even into my purer mind, 
With tranquil restoration : — feelings too 
Of unremembered pleasure : such, perhaps, 
As have no slight or trivial influence 
On that best portion of a good man's life, 
His little, nameless, unremembered acts 
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, 
To them I may have owed another gift, 
Of aspect more sublime ; that blessed mood, 
In which the burthen of the mystery, 
In which the heavy and the weary weight 
Of all this unintelligible world, 
Is lightened :— that serene and blessed mood, 
In which the affections gently lead us on, — 
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame 
And even the motion of our human blood 
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
In body, and become a living soul : 
While with an eye made quiet by the power 
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 
We see into the life of things. If this 
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh ! how oft — 
In darkness and amid the many shapes 
Of joyless daylight ; when the fretful stir 
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, 
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart — 
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, 
O sylvan Wye ! thou wanderer thro' the woods, 
How often has my spirit turned to thee ! 

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thoughts, 
With mauy recognitions dim and faint, 
And somewhat of a sad perplexity, 
The picture of the mind revives again : 
While here I stand, not only with the sense 
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts 
That in this moment there is life and food 
For future years. And so I dare to hope, 

12 



178 WORDSWORTH 

Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first 

I came among these hills ; when like a roe 

I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides 

Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, 

Wherever nature led : more like a man 

Flying from something that he dreads, than one 

Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then 

(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, 

And their glad animal movements all gone by) 

To me was all in all ; — I cannot paint 

What then I was. The sounding cataract 

Haunted me like a passion ; the tall rock, 

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 

Their colours and their forms, were then to me 

An appetite ; a feeling and a love, 

That had no need of a remoter charm, 

By thought supplied, nor any interest 

Unborrowed from the eye. — That time is past, 

And all its aching joys are now no more, 

And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this 

Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur ; other gifts 

Have followed ; for such loss, I would believe, 

Abundant recompence. For I have learned 

To look on nature, not as in the hour 

Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing oftentimes 

The still, sad music of humanity, 

Not harsh, nor grating, though of ample power 

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt 

A presence that disturbs me with the joy 

Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 

Of something far more deeply interfused, 

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 

And the round ocean and the living air, 

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ; 

A motion and a spirit, that impels 

All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still 

A lover of the meadows and the woods 

And mountains ; and of all that we behold 

From this green earth ; of all the mighty world 

Of eye, and ear, — both what they half create, 

And what perceive ; well pleased to recognise 

In nature and the language of the sense, 

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 



"lines written above tintern abbey" 179 

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
Of all my moral being. 

Nor perchance, 
If I were not thus taught, should I the more 
Suffer my genial spirits to decay : 
For thou art with me here upon the banks 
Of this fair river ; thou my dearest friend, 
My dear, dear friend ; and in thy voice I catch 
The language of my former heart, and read 
My former pleasures in the shooting lights 
Of thy wild eyes. Oh ! yet a little while 
May I behold in thee what I was once, 
My dear, dear Sister ! and this pi'ayer I make, 
Knowing that Nature never did betray 
The heart that loved her : 'tis her privilege 
Through all the years of this our life, to lead 
From joy to joy ; for she can so inform 
The mind that is within us, so impress 
With quietness and beauty, and so feed 
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, 
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, 
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 
The dreary intercourse of daily life, 
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb 
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold 
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon 
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk ; 
And let the misty mountain winds be free 
To blow against thee : and, in after years, 
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured 
Into a sober pleasure ; when thy mind 
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, 
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place 
For all sweet sounds and harmonies ; oh ! then, 
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, 
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts 
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, 
And these my exhortations ! Nor, perchance, 
If I should be where I no more can hear 
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams 
Of past existence — wilt thou then forget 
That on the banks of this delightful stream 
We stood together ; and that I, so long 
A worshipper of nature, hither came 



180 WORDSWORTH 

Unwearied in that service : rather say 

With warmer love — oh ! with far deeper zeal 

Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget, 

That after many wanderings, many years 

Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, 

And this green pastoral landscape, were to me 

More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake ! " 

This poem is characteristic of the loftiest side of 

Wordsworth's genius. In it he struck for the first time 

the sublime note that has drawn men after him as the 

prophet of a new delight, a full-voiced speaker of 

things that all feel dimly and vaguely, but which no 

poet before him had expressed with such force. But 

mark, as confirming what I have said about the gradual 

character of transitions in poetry, that both the rhythm 

of Wordsworth's lines and the feeling expressed are 

developments from Cowper. The level Ouse flowed 

through a flatter landscape than the Derwent, and there 

was a fire and majesty in Wordsworth's stronger spirit 

that we look for in vain in the gentle Cowper. But the 

direction of their feelings was the same ; the rhythm 

of their verse had much in common ; Wordsworth's 

torch was kindled at Cowper's. " A great poet creates 

the taste b}^ which he is enjoyed," Wordsworth said, 

and the sa} T ing is often repeated. But it is isolating 

him too much to sav that he created the taste that en- 
i *• 

joyed his Nature poetry. We can believe this only 
when we ignore all that happened in the half century 
between Pope's death and the appearance of the " Lyri- 
cal Ballads." 

No : the current formula that Wordsworth created 
the taste by which he is enjo} 7 ed is only a half or a 
quarter truth. The currency that the saying has 
obtained is due chiefly to a vague impression, such as 
often arises when the facts of history are mingled 
together and fancifully rearranged in the popular 
memory — a vague impression that all Wordsworth's 



HOSTILE RECEPTION OF " LYBICAL BALLADS " 181 

poetry was received with a howl of derision and ridi- 
cule when first submitted to the public. There were 
three veins in one volume — "Tintern Abbey Lines," 
"Guilt and Sorrow," and the " Lyrical Ballads." Now, 
it was not against what is commonly understood by his 
Nature poetry, — such poetry as I have quoted, — that the 
storm was directed, but against some of his lyrical 
ballads, strictly so called : " The Idiot Boy," " Goody 
Blake," and " The Thorn." And the storm did not 
become loud and long till Wordsworth not only 
defended these poems in his famous Preface, but with 
aggressive obstinacy maintained that all true poetry 
must be composed on the same principles. Further, 
though the storm against these poems has long since 
subsided into a calm, the taste for them has not yet 
been created. Even Mr. Myers admits that "The 
Thorn," "The Idiot Boy," and "Goody Blake and 
Harry Gill" have been "justly blamed for triviality." 
As I am one of the few who do not agree with this ver- 
dict, having a natural taste for such grotesque mix- 
tures of pathos and rough humor, — a taste not created 
by Wordsworth, but more probably by a bucolic up- 
bringing, — I am all the less likely to be biassed in the 
admission that the taste is not general. 

These lyrical ballads, which owed their origin to an 
accident, are certainly strange and original, fully 
colored by the poet's individuality. The idea of writ- 
ing them probably occurred to Wordsworth when he 
was conversing with Coleridge over the German imita- 
tions of Percy's old English ballads. The idea of 
writing the " Ancient Mariner " occurred in the course 
of the same companionship, and the difference between 
them and the " Mariner " represents the difference in 
individual character between Wordsworth and Cole- 
ridge. The two friends began writing the "Mariner" 
together, but their conceptions were so different that 
Wordsworth left Coleridge to finish it. 



CHAPTER XIII 
wordsworth — continued 

"THE IDIOT BOY" — PROSE V. POETRY — COLERIDGE ON WORDS- 
WORTH 

If you have read some of the lyrical ballads to which 
I directed you, you will not, I think, be surprised that 
they appeared trivial, absurd, and even repulsive to the 
generality of readers of poetry when first they made 
their appearance. The wonder, rather, is that they 
found as many readers as they did, for though many 
mocked, a considerable number read them, as appears 
from the fact that a second edition was called for in 
1800. This could hardly have been the case if the vein 
of sentiment had been altogether new in literature. 
Sensibility to the joys and sorrows of humble folk, a 
disposition never entirely absent from civilized com- 
munities, we may well believe, had been deliberately 
cultivated during the latter part of the eighteenth cen- 
tury as an artistic motive. A whole school of prose 
fiction ministered to this sentiment, the most prominent 
examples of which are Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" and 
"Sentimental Journey," where the sentiment appears 
casualty, and Mackenzie's " Man of Feeling," where it 
is the dominant feeling. Universal sympathy, tender 
interest in every-thing that lives and moves, was the 
note of this school. Burns wore out two copies of the 
" Man of Feeling" carrying it about in his pocket ; and 
it doubtless helped to awaken and foster in him the 
tenderness of heart that inspired his " Address to the 
Mouse." Sensibility, in fact, pervaded literature dur- 
ing the last forty years of the century, and the tender 

182 



HOW WORDSWORTH CAME TO WRITE BALLADS 183 

experiences of Betty F03', the mother of the Idiot Boy, 
would have commended themselves from the mere force 
of literary custom to thousands of readers, if dressed to 
advantage in the familiar sentimental prose style. And, 
although Wordsworth's style was not the familiar style, 
the taste for the kind of subject at least had been culti- 
vated before his day. 

The stoiy of the accident that led Wordsworth to 
write ballads on subjects taken from common life is 
well known, and was put on record by himself in a note 
to the " Idiot Boy." In the spring of 1798, when he 
and Coleridge were near neighbors and close friends, 
they proposed making a walking tour together, and 
to meet the expense it occurred to them to write 
together a ballad by the way and send it to the New 
Monthly Magazine. The poem of the " Ancient 
Mariner" was the result. Wordsworth made a few 
suggestions and contributed a few lines, but, as he says, 
"as we endeavored to proceed conjointly (I speak of the 
same evening) our respective manners proved so different' 
that it would have been quite presumptuous in me to 
do any thing but separate from an undertaking upon 
which I could have been only a clog." He proceeded 
instead to write independently lyrical ballads "on 
natural subjects, taken from common life, but looked at, 
as far as might be, through an imaginative medium." 
The difference between the "Lyrical Ballads" and the 
"Ancient Mariner " represents the difference in indi- 
vidual character and history between Coleridge and 
Wordsworth. Ideas work themselves out differently 
according to the minds in which they take root. 

Wordsworth was country-bred, familiar only with the 
simple folk of the Northern dales till he was seventeen; 
and his experience of towns and townspeople did not 
evoke new sympathies to supplant the old. It was not 
merely the face of inanimate nature that had charms for 
him. He had the keenest sympathy with his humble 



184 WORDSWORTH 

country neighbors. The simple incidents of their lives 
interested him as much as they interested the humblest 
gossip in the hamlet or in the hill-side cottage, though 
in a different way. His imagination fastened on these 
incidents, and transfigured them. Consider, for example, 
the incidents of the "The Idiot Boy" as they would 
present themselves to an ordinary village gossip, and 
you will understand Wordsworth's theory about the 
creative function of the poet : 

" Imagination needs must stir, 
Dear maid, this truth believe, 
Minds that have little to confer 
Find little to perceive." 

Old Betty Foy, who lives in the same house with Susan 
Gale, has an only child, Johnny, an idiot, whom she 
loves with all her heart. Susan falls ill, and Betty 
mounts her poor boy on a pony and sends him for the 
doctor. The boy does not return. Betty is alarmed 
and goes in search of him ; finds him after a long search 
in a vale staring at the stars and listening to the hoot- 
ing of the owls, perfectly delighted with them and him- 
self. Susan meantime, left alone, gets anxious in her 
turn, ceases to feel her ailments, gets up and hobbles 
after, and the two old women, delighted with the 
recovery of Johnny, forget all about the illness, and 
bring him home in merry triumph. That is all the 
story of the Idiot Boy. To most people it must always 
appear trivial, yet when Wordsworth heard of the inci- 
dent it haunted his imagination. He pictured to himself 
the Idiot Boy's delight when he was put on horseback, 
the mother's pride that he could be of some use, the 
fears that came over her as hour after hour passed and 
neither he nor the doctor came, her growing impatience, 
her wild agitated search in the moonlight, and her over- 
flowing joy when at last she found the truant. Every 
stanza in the poem is a vivid picture of simple human 



MRS. OLIPHANT'S CRITICISMS 185 

feeling, delightful if you have any interest in the 
motherly feelings of such a poor old woman as Betty 
Foy. But we cannot be surprised that so few entered 
into the spirit of Wordsworth's imagination. Even 
now, when his fame is established, and it is customary 
to denounce the purblind critics who ridiculed his first 
publication, we find " The Idiot Boy " generally given 
up as a mistaken experiment. Wordsworth uninten- 
tionally took a sweeping revenge on those early critics 
when he rearranged his poems so that their chronological 
order cannot be followed without some trouble ; for 
many people now loathe and detest and reprobate their 
memory who entirely agree with them. Mrs. 01 i- 
phant, — who, although she uses the now orthodox 
language against the worthless critics who sneered 
at the "Lyrical Ballads" — the literary gladiators 
who fleshed their swords upon Wordsworth's first 
efforts, — condemns without knowing it the very poems 
that they condemned, and, in language equally strong, 
makes a comparison between "The Idiot Boy" and 
"John Gilpin," very much to the disadvantage of the 
former. " The choice of such colloquial familiarity of 
treatment," she says, "as suggests a jocular rather than 
a serious meaning, the absolute insignificance of the 
incident, and the absence of any attempt to give grace 
and dignity to the story, balked its effect completely as 
an exposition of nature, while the humor in it was too 
feeble, too diffuse, to give it a lively comic interest. 
Cowper had ventured to be quite as colloquial and 
realistic in ' John Gilpin,' with electrical effect." The 
comparison between "The Idiot Boy" and "John 
Gilpin " is not a happy one, for the two poems are in 
veiy different keys of humor : we are expected by the 
poet in the one case to smile with moist eyes and heart 
profoundly touched, and in the other to laugh heartily. 
Mrs. Oliphant complains of " the absolute insignifi- 
cance of the incident," and "the absence of any attempt 



186 WORDSWORTH 

to give grace and dignity to the story." While such 
complaints are made by professed admirers of Words- 
worth, who find no words too hard for the injustice 
done him by the contemporary critics of the " Lyrical 
Ballads," how can Wordsworth be said to have created 
the taste by which he is enjoyed ? His admirers now 
repeat the same criticisms of the same works. It was in 
defence of himself against such complaints as are made 
by Mrs. Oliphant and Mr. Myers that Wordsworth wrote 
his celebrated Preface. There are two passages from 
this Preface that are very often repeated : one that the 
language used in poetry should be the language really 
used by men, and the other that poetry is the sponta- 
neous overflow of powerful feeling — that it takes its 
origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity. These 
two dicta have passed into literature as the quintessence 
of Wordsworth's poetical theory, and they fit in with 
the current conception of Wordsworth as the leader of 
the revolution against the poetical theories of the eigh- 
teenth century. But the Preface, as you will see if you 
read the whole of it, was much more limited in its pur- 
pose ; it was apologetic, and not constructive ; it was 
really an elaborate justification of his own practice in 
the case of the lyrical ballads, not the enunciation of a 
universally binding poetic creed, although Wordsworth, 
not the meekest of men, was inclined to take the aggres- 
sive against what his critics considered good poetry. 
We must read the Preface along with "The Idiot Boy," 
" The Thorn," " Goody Blake," " Peter Bell," and other 
ballads of the same class, if we would understand its 
purport. As the meaning of the theory that the lan- 
guage of poetry should be the language really used by 
men — a theory that every-body has heard of that has 
ever heard of the name of Wordsw T orth, as the meaning 
of this theory is not very generally understood — it may 
be worth while to recall what Wordsworth actually 
did say. 



RUSTIC LANGUAGE IN POETRY 187 

"The principal object proposed in these poems [the "Lyrical 
Ballads"] was to choose incidents and situations from common 
life, and to relate and describe them, throughout, as far as was possi- 
ble, in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same 
time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, 
whir by ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an un- 
usiud aspect ; and further, and above all, to make these incidents 
and associations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not 
ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature, chiefly as far as 
regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of ex- 
citement." 

It is commonly supposed that by the language really 
used by men Wordsworth meant colloquial language, 
above all, for poetic purposes, the language of rustics ; 
and, seeing that the vocabulary of an ordinary peasant 
is extremely limited, the theory has been laughed at as 
a preposterous limitation of poetry. But Wordsworth 
did not really propose any thing so absurd as this. He 
did, indeed, defend the choice for poetry of themes 
from rustic life and language from rustic life, because 
"the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in 
which they can attain their maturity, are less under 
restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic lan- 
guage"; and because peasants "hourly communicate with 
the best objects from which the best part of language is 
originally derived," and " from their rank in life, and 
the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being 
less under the influence of social vanitj'', they convey 
their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated 
expressions." In this overstrained argument in his own 
defence Wordsworth undoubtedly went too far, and ex- 
posed himself to very obvious and easy ridicule. But 
even in this passage he did not commit himself to the 
theory that all poetry should be composed of such homely 
materials ; he w r as only in a spirit of defiant paradox 
playing for a little with the idea that if a poet dealt 
only with the feelings of peasants, and used only words 
known to them, his poetry was likely to be more perma- 



1 S8 WORDSWORTH 

nently intelligible and interesting. The paradox is 
arguable, but against it must be set the fact that the 
words of rustic dialects, though very persistent, do be- 
come obsolete and acquire new shades of meaning as 
much as the words of literature and cultivated speech ; 
and the further fact that, as civilization advances, the 
relations among individuals and the feelings thence 
arising become too complicated to be typified by the 
incidents of life in a country parish. This part of 
Wordsworth's theory may be dismissed as overstrained 
and fantastic. Only it must be remembered, to do him 
justice, that he did not propose to use bare incidents 
without a coloring of imagination, and that the poet's 
words were to be a selection and a metrical arrangement, 
the selection dictated by the feeling to be expressed, 
and the feeling by the poet's sensibility. 

The opinion in favor of rustic language was, however, 
but a part of Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction, a 
casual and detachable incident. The main thesis of his 
preface, of his apology for his own poetry, was that 
poetry has no special language distinct from that of 
ordinary life or of prose ; that the language of passion, 
of powerful feeling, is the same whether in metre or 
not ; that it is possible to write poetiy without using 
any other words than such as are to be found in prose 
writing. 

" If in a poem there should be found a series of lines, or even a 
single line, in which the language, though naturally arranged, 
and according to the strict laws of metre, does not differ from that 
of prose, there is a numerous class of critics who, when they 
stumble upon these prosaisms, as they call them, imagine that they 
have made a notable discovery, and exult over the poet as over a 
man ignorant of his own profession. Now, these men would 
establish a canon of criticism which the reader will conclude he 
must utterly reject, if he wishes to be pleased with these volumes. 
And it would be a most easy task to prove to him that not only 
the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of the 
most elevated character, must necessarily, except with reference 



COLERIDGE ON WORDSWORTH 189 

to the metre, in no respect differ from that of good prose, but like- 
wise thut some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will 
be found to be strictly the language of prose, when prose is well 
written." 

And again : 

" It may be safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, any 
essential difference between the language of prose and metrical 
composition." 

This was the gist of Wordsworth's theory of poetic 
diction, tliat in the best parts of the best poems no words 
are used that are special and peculiar to poetry, that 
would not be found in well-written prose. I might 
claim it, I think, as confirming the view I have expressed 
to you as to the influence of the prose literature of the 
eighteenth century in effecting the change that took 
place in poetry soon after the French Revolution. But, 
you may ask, was Wordsworth's theory correct ? Surely, 
you will say, the order of the words, the construction of 
the sentences, is different in poetry ? And the selection 
of the words is different ? Coleridge, in his criticism of 
Wordsworth's theory in the " Biographia Literaria," 
perhaps the most suggestive and eloquent piece of 
critical writing in our language, urges both of these 
considerations as if Wordsworth had denied them. He 
will not believe that Wordsworth could have meant only 
that the words used in the best poetry must be such 
words as would excite no surprise if they appeared in 
good prose, because, he says, nobody who had enjoyed 
the slightest opportunity of understanding Words- 
worth's mind and character would suspect him of pro- 
claiming a truism. Therefore it must have been Words- 
worth's intention to claim for the best poetry the same 
style as prose in the ordinary sense of the word style, 
having reference to the composition, the arrangement, 
ior, as Coleridge says, the ordonnance of the words, and 
1 not the mere word'-' themselves. And, interpreting 



190 WORDSWORTH 

Wordsworth in this way, his friendly critic has no diffi- 
culty in showing that neither in his own poetry nor in 
any other poetry is the style identical with that of prose. 
" The true question must be, whether there are not modes 
of expression, a construction, and an order of sentences, 
which are in their fit and natural place in a serious prose 
composition, but would be disproportionate and hetero- 
geneous in metrical poetry ; and, vice versa, whether in 
the language of a serious poem there may not be an 
arrangement both of words and of sentences, and a use 
and a selection of (what are called) figures of speech, 
both as to their kind, their frequency, and their occa- 
sions, which on a subject of equal weight would be 
vicious and alien in correct and manly prose. I contend 
that in both cases the unfitness of each for the place of 
the other frequently will and ought to exist." 

Coleridge's interpretation of Wordsworth and his 
reply upon this interpretation have both been universally 
accepted since the " Biographia Literaria " was published, 
Coleridge's early intimacy with Wordsworth lending 
authorit}' to his interpretation, and common-sense lend- 
ing sanction to his reply to the theory as interpreted. ; 
And yet it is impossible to read Wordsworth's Preface 
through with care enough to group and put together 
his detached statements, concentration of dry thought 
not being one of his virtues as a writer, without feeling 
that he never meant to deny what Coleridge affirmed \ 
against him ; that he abstained from insisting upon this ! 
difference between poetry and prose in point of arrange- 
ment only because he regarded it as a truism ; and that 
when he spoke of there being no essential difference 
between the language of prose and metrical composition, 
he was thinking of the mere words, if \>y words we un- 
derstand figurative words as well as plain literal words. 
His language again and again implies that the dis- 
tinction between poetry and prose emphasized by Cole- 
ridge was present to his mind. He discusses at length 






the poet's theory and his practice 191 

and with great analytic skill how and why it is that 
metre adds to the reader's pleasure, speaking of the 
"continual and regular impulses of pleasurable surprise 
from the metrical arrangement." He indicates, in fact, 
the very theory of the origin and effect of metre that 
Coleridge develops more fully and presents as a qualifica- 
tion of Wordsworth's doctrine. It was no part of that 
doctrine that the poetic order of words must necessarily 
be the prose order, though he contended, in vindication of 
his own pi-actice in the metrical ballads, that it might be 
the prose order, without losing any of the power peculiar 
to poetry. The point that Coleridge labored most against 
Wordsworth and established most brilliantly was that 
there are figures of speech which, as regard kind, and 
number, and occasion, would be in place in poetry and out 
of place in correct and manly prose. But I don't think 
that Wordsworth had overlooked even this, though he 
did not guard himself with sufficient care against being 
supposed to have overlooked it ; for he says that " if. 
the poet's subject be judiciously chosen, it will naturally, 
and upon fit occasion, lead him to passions the language 
1 of which, if selected truly and judiciously, must neces- 
sarily be dignified and variegated, and alive with 
< metaphors and figures." What he objected to was the 
I. " poet's intervening any foreign splendor of his own 
] with that which the passion naturally suggests." 

That it was the words and the words only that Words- 
worth had in his mind when he maintained that the 
! language of poetry did not differ essentially from the 
language of prose is further shown by the example he 
quotes from Gray : 

"In vain to me the smiling mornings shine 
And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden tire : 
The birds in vain their amorous descant join, 
Or cheerful fields resume their green attire. 
These ears, alas ! for other notes repine ; 
A different object do these eyes require ; 



192 WORDSWORTH 

My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine; 
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire : 
Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer, 
And new-born pleasure brings to happier men ; 
The fields to all their wonted tribute bear ; 
To warm their little loves the birds complain. 
I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear, 
And weep the more because I weep in vain." 

" It will easily be perceived," he goes on to say, " that 
the only part of this sonnet which is of any value is the 
lines printed in italics ; it is equally obvious that, except 
in the rhyme, and in the use of the single word 'fruit- 
less' for fruitlessly, which is so far a defect, the lan- 
guage of these lines does in no respect differ from that 
of prose." 

If Wordsworth's plain statements had not been suf- 
ficiently explicit, his comments on this passage would 
have been sufficient to show that what he really objected 
to was the habitual employment b} r poets of certain 
conventional figures of speech that had dropped out of 
the prose style, and had come to be regarded as the ex- 
clusive colors of poetic diction. The expulsion of these 
conventionalities was all the revolution that he pro- 
posed in poetic style. The truth is that in the heat of 
the moment, with all the arrogance and obstinacy of his 
nature, roused by the ridicule poured on his ballads, he 
exaggerated the difference between his own poetry and 
that of his pi-edecessors. He told the public with lofty 
anger that the public taste was corrupt, and that if they 
wished to enjoy his poems, which were deliberately 
adapted to interest mankind permanently, they must 
give up much of what was ordinarily enjoyed. All 
this was provoked by the open contempt for his pro- 
saisms. He carried the war into the enemy's country 
with the angry retort: "Cleanse yourselves of your 
gaudy, glossy, meaningless, conventional poeticisms, ami 
then you will be able to enjoy my prosaisms" His 



THE POET'S THEORY AND HIS PRACTICE 193 

special plea for the colloquial language of rustics was 
but a side issue in his general poetic theory, intended 
only for the special defence of a few passages in the 
"Lyrical Ballads" — in " The Thorn," for example, and 
in " The Idiot Boy." A not uncommon impression is 
that Wordsworth advocated this as the only fitting 
language for poetry, and, upon this misunderstanding, 
readers naturally charge the poet with gross inconsist- 
ency between his theory and his practice ; for if you 
open a volume of Wordsworth's poems anywhere, you 
will find abundance of words that are never to be heard 
in the mouth of an ordinary rustic. But } 7 ou will not, I 
think, find many words that would be considered inad- 
missible in prose style, supposing always, what was 
part of his theory, that the prose writer was in the same 

I exalted key of feeling with the poet. You may say, as 

1 Coleridge said, that this is in fact an unreal and artificial 
supposition ; that when feelings reach a certain pitch of 

i intensity, they cannot as a matter of fact be expressed 
in prose so as to command the sympathy of the reader ; 

: that metrical language is the customary vehicle of 

: intense feeling ; that we expect to find a less impas- 
sioned strain in prose, and are consequently disposed to 

i ridicule, as out of place, figures of speech in harmony 
with the strain, which from habit and association we 
regard as appropriate in poetry. That Wordsworth 

'< would have admitted this, if it had been put to him, we 

1 have every reason to believe from what he actually says, 
but when he wrote the Preface, he was in too aggressive 
a mood to be particular about stating his doctrine with 
all the explicit qualifications needful to meet obvious 

' objections. He did not care to present it in such a way 
as to win instant acceptance from common-sense. He 

' was for the moment wilfully, not to say arrogantly, 
paradoxical ; and while we recognize that he was mis- 
understood, we must admit that he had himself to 
blame. 
13 



194 WORDS WORTH 

Another part of the poetic theory set forth in the 
Preface has received much less attention than his theoiy 
of j;>oetic diction, although it deserves more as a clue 
to Wordsworth's main point of distinction from other 
poets. It concerns his choice of subjects and his mode 
of constructing his poems. Perhaps evolving or devel- 
oping is a better word to use than constructing, because 
on principle the poet left his imagination more free 
than the artist generally does to follow the impulses of 
the feelings aroused by his subject. Wordsworth's 
theory was put forward primarily to defend himself 
against the charge of triviality and insignificance in his 
choice of subjects and incidents, the charge that Mrs. 
Oliphant repeats. But it has a much wider bearing, and 
it is worth taking some pains to understand his meaning 
for two reasons : In the first place, such poetry as 
Wordsworth's, as he himself pointed out, cannot be 
thoroughly enjoyed unless you follow the course of his 
imagination in composing it. Mere passive reading 
will not do; the reader's imagination must exert itself 
to accompany the poet's. And in the second place, 
though this is an inferior motive, there are several cant 
terms in contemporary criticism that have grown out 
of Wordsworth's doctrine, and are often used — some- 
times intelligently and sometimes not, but, in one way 
or the other, often. The fashionable word evolution, 
when rightly employed in poetic criticism, is employed 
in a sense defined by Wordsworth's theory as to how a 
poet should proceed. 

Accused of choosing trivial incidents in his lyrical 
ballads, Wordsworth's reply was that " the feeling 
therein developed gives importance to the action and 
situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling." 
" Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feel- 
ing." The poet's business is to study " the manner in 
which we associate ideas in a state of excitement," and 
in proportion as the succession of ideas in his poetry 



THE POET'S DEFENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE 195 

obeys these natural laws of association, follows this 
course of evolution, his poetry is real poetry, and not a 
rhetorical imitation. Closely intervoven with this doc- 
trine in Wordsworth's statement of it was another not 
strictly relevant, that people are too much accustomed 
to the use of gross and violent stimulants in poetry ; 
that they thirst for startling incidents, strange situa- 
tions, violent passions, the favorite objects of sensational 
and romantic fiction. This charge against the public 
taste was part of Wordsworth's indignant and defiant 
retort upon his critics, and not, as I have said, strictly 
relevant to his theory as to the right mode of poetic 
evolution out of powerful feeling. Strictly speaking, 
of course, the mode of evolution is independent of the 
origin of the intense feeling that sets the imagination to 
work ; we can only say that the feeling must be there, 
no matter what the nature of the stimulant that has 
given occasion to it. Still, this complaint about " the 
degrading thirst for outrageous stimulation," as he calls 
it, has a certain connection with Wordsworth's doctrine 
about the poet's main business. For, the poet being 
bound to study "the manner in which we associate ideas 
in a state of excitement," he can do this only in his 
own mind ; he must study how his imagination is 
affected by events within his own experience. Hence, 
while other poets, as he pictured them, were ransacking 
history for good poetical subjects, such as were in their 
own nature extraordinary, and might be tricked out by 
the fancy in such a way as to impress all readers, he 
chose his subjects from incidents in familiar life that 
had strongly impressed him and put his imagination in 
motion. But there was another condition of good 
poetry. Not every image that the excited mind con- 
jures up is necessarily poetical. The poet must select 
and modify for a particular purpose, that of giving 
immediate pleasure. " Nor let this necessity of pro- 
ducing immediate pleasure," he cries, "be cxmsidered as 



196 WORDSWORTH 

a degradation of the poet's art. It is far otherwise. It 
is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe — 
an acknowledgment the more sincere because not 
formal, but indirect; it is a task light and easy to 
him who looks at the world in the spirit of love; 
further, it is a homage paid to the native and naked 
dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle 
of pleasure, by which he knows and feels and lives 
and moves." 

The poet's choice of what his imagination evolves 
being thus restricted, how should lie proceed in choos- 
ing his subjects? When any incident excites him to 
intense feeling, he should study how his imagination 
works in raising that feeling to a higher pitch if it is 
pleasurable; or if it is painful, throwing a veil over it 
or changing the light that falls upon it till it can be 
looked at with pathetic resignation. In every person 
the imagination is more or less active in this work of 
increase and consolation; conjuring only images that 
reconcile us to sorrow and give a lovelier complexion to 
joy. The poet, with his keener sensibilities and more 
active imagination, does this more than other men. 
Wordsworth tried deliberate^ to be true to nature as a 
poet by putting into metrical language only the imagery 
that grew up in his mind under the impulse of intense 
feeling. If you read " The Thorn," you can trace how 
the imaginative structure was gradually reared that had 
its origin in a feeling of keen pity for the poor, outcast, 
suspected lunatic Martha Ray. The thought of this 
outcast, when he heard her story or saw her sitting 
by her thorn, haunted him. The poem really repre- 
sents the fancies with which he soothed the disquiet 
of his own spirit at the existence of such miseries 
in the world, just as the poem of " The Idiot Boy " 
is composed of the fancies with which he heightened 
his enjoyment of the touching incident that was its 
foundation in fact. 



DANGER OF TAKING ADVICE OF CRITICS 197 

It must be further added, and the fact explains the 
strength as well as the imperfections of Wordsworth's 
poetry, that, writing on these principles, he wrote chiefly 
to please himself, " with his eye on the object," as he 
said, and without much regard to the effect to be pro- 
duced upon the reader. When the feelings stirred in 
him by what he saw, or heard, or read were satisfied 
hy the work of his imagination, he had little solicitude 
about the best means of communicating the same satis- 
faction to his reader. The best means were the means 
that gave satisfaction to himself. And as his own life 
was peculiar, — the life of a solitary student, or of a 
student moving within a narrow circle of interests, — it 
was not to be expected that what interested him would 
interest every-body. Of this he was aware, but it did 
not influence his practice. 

"lam sensible," he wrote, "that my associations must have 
sometimes been particular instead of general, and that, conse- 
quently, giving to things a false importance, I may sometimes 
have written upon unworthy subjects ; but I am less apprehensive 
on this account, than that my language may frequently have suf- 
fered from those arbitrary connections of feelings and ideas with 
particular words and phrases, from which no man can altogether 
protect himself. Hence I have no doubt that, in some instances, 
feelings, even of the ludicrous, may be given to my readers by 
expressions which appeared to me tender and pathetic. Such 
faulty expressions, were I convinced they were faulty at present, 
and that they must necessarily continue to be so, I would will- 
ingly take all reasonable pains to correct. But it is dangerous to 
make these alterations on the simple authority of a few individ- 
uals, or even of certain classes of men ; for where the under- 
standing of an author is not convinced, or his feelings altered, 
this cannot be done without great injury to himself : for his own 
feelings are his stay and support, and if he set them aside in one 
instance, he may be induced to repeat this act till his mind shall 
lose all confidence in itself, and become utterly debilitated." 

We need go no further to understand the antagonism 
that Wordsworth provoked. It was no personal malig- 



198 WORDSWORTH 

nity. Controversy took a personal turn because he chal- 
lenged comparison between his own feelings and those 
of others. It is the merit of such poetry that it is the 
expression of genuine feeling actually felt, and not of 
what the poet supposed that the world in general would 
feel in presence of certain objects. 



CHAPTER XIV 
Wordsworth (continued) — coleridge — southey 

You will be pleased to hear, I think, that I have 
abandoned the idea of trying to lecture you into an ad- 
miration of Wordsworth. I had intended to occupy 
this lecture with going over some of Wordsworth's 
poems, and pointing out their distinctive charms ; but 
on mature consideration I have come to the conclusion 
that I should only be wasting your time, because those 
of you who are fitted by temperament to enjoy his 
poems will do so without any prompting, and those of 
you who are not would probably remain deaf to any 
rhetoric of mine in their favor. No poet is more un- 
equal than Wordsworth, and I cannot forget the fact 
that when I was young myself I had too intolerant an 
aversion to his prosy sermonizing to have patience 
enough to approach in a sympathetic spirit what I now 
read with delight. It was this, indeed, that at first 
tempted me to think of picking out a few poems that 
might serve as an introduction to a sympathetic under- 
standing of the man, but, on the whole, I think I had 
better leave that to the influence of time. It is charac- 
teristic of Wordsworth that his imagination was always 
set in motion by personal feelings ; and unless you sym- 
pathize with the initiatory feeling, which you are not 
likely to do if } r ou have not passed through something 
of the same experience, you cannot be expected to fol- 
low his imagination in its flight without an effort that 
is fatal to any real enjoyment of poetry. You can al- 
ways be sure of finding in Wordsworth a genuine feel- 
ing of some kind, and if you have any delight in exter- 
nal nature, you will find that he awakens you, as no 

199 



200 WORDSWORTH 

other poet can, to unsuspected aspects of familiar things, 
not merely fixing the eye on striking features that had 
escaped your observation, but inspiring them with new 
suggestions. But preliminary sympathy with the poet's 
attitude is indispensable, and something more than a 
casual lecture is needed to give you that. 

I shall content myself, therefore, in continuation and 
conclusion of what I said the other day, with referring 
to a few poems that may illustrate the relation between 
the imaginative structure and the emotional motive in 
his poetry. You remember my quoting his saying that 
true poetry has its origin in emotion ; it is emotion that 
sets the imagination, the creative constructive faculty, 
at work ; the imagination exerts itself to multiply and 
modify this initial feeling. You may call this, then, 
the emotional motive, while the fabric reared at the 
bidding of this motive, and conditioned through all its 
parts by the nature of this motive, may be called the 
imaginative structure, the temple reared as a fitting 
habitation for the feeling that commanded the poet's 
creative faculty to build a home for it. Now, Words- 
worth, as you will remember, held that poets generally 
worked under the influence of too outrageous emotional 
stimulants ; their imaginations were not quick enough, 
not spontaneous enough, not sufficiently delighted with 
their own exercise, to be put in motion by slight and 
ordinary impulses; they remained still, dull, inert, except 
when visited by strong, violent, extraordinary excite- 
ments. His imagination was more excitable, more ready 
to stir ; and besides, on moral grounds, he deliberately 
trained it to respond to slight impulses, and find its 
delight in its own exercise. 

Hence arises what at first sight seems an anomaly in 
Wordsworth's poetry, as well as an apparent contradic- 
tion between his practice and some parts of his theory. 
Search his poems through, and you will find some that 
start from humbler, slighter themes than those of any 



THE EMOTIONAL MOTIVE IN POETRY 201 

other poet of high rank. But his poetry is not on that 
account simple. On the contrary, search his poems 
through, and you will find some, such as the famous 
odes to "Duty" and on the "Intimations of Immor- 
tality," that are as intricate, elaborate, and abstruse, as 
remote from the ordinary paths of thought, as ever 
poet's imagination created. The emotional motive is 
simple, the passion has almost always a simple origin, 
and often is of no great intensity; but the imaginative 
structure is generally elaborate, and, when the poet is at 
his best, supremely splendid and gorgeous. No poet 
has built such magnificent palaces of rare material for 
the ordinary every-day homely human affections. And 
it is because he has invested our every-day principles of 
conduct, which are so apt to become threadbare, with 
such imperishable robes of finest texture and richest 
design that Wordsworth holds so high a place among 
the great moralists of his race. 

Take the greatest of his poems, the "Ode to Duty." 
The emotional motive to this is nothing more extraor- 
dinary than a quiet resolution, formed in no tempestuous 
moment of repentance, but in a placid stretch of even 
life, to make duty the rule of his conduct. But with 
what a splendor his imagination invests this ! to what 
heights of ecstasy does he lift this simple feeling ! — 

" Through no disturbance of my soul, 
Or strong compunction in me wrought, 
I supplicate for thy control ; 
But in the quietness of thought : 
Me this unchartered freedom tires ; 
I feel the weight of chance-desires ; 
My hopes no more must change their name, 
I long for a repose that ever is the same. 

" Stern Lawgiver ! yet thou dost wear 
The Godhead's most benignant grace ; 
Nor know we anything so fair 
As is the smile upon thy face : 



202 WORDSWORTH 

Flowers laugh before thee on their beds 
And fragrance in thy footing treads ; 
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong ; 
And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and 
strong. 

" To humbler functions, awful Power ! 
I call thee : I myself commend 
Unto thy guidance from this hour ; 
Oh, let my weakness have an end ! 
Give unto me, made lowly wise, 
The spirit of self-sacrifice ; 
The confidence of reason give ; 
And in the light of truth thy Bondman let me live ! " 

So simple is the motive often that unless the path 
taken by the imagination is of itself delightful to you, 
unless you are caught up Avith it and transported, you 
are left at the end with a feeling as if there had been 
much ado about nothing. In illustration of this I would 
cite " The Solitary Reaper " : 

" Behold her, single in the field, 
Yon solitary Highland lass ! 
Reaping and singing by herself ; 
Stop here, or gently pass ! 
Alone she cuts and binds the grain, 
And sings a melancholy strain ; 
O listen ! for the Vale profound 
Is overflowing with the sound. 

" No nightingale did ever chaunt 
More welcome notes to weary bands 
Of travellers in some shady haunt, 
Among Arabian sands: 
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard 
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird, 
Breaking the silence of the seas 
Among the farthest Hebrides. 

" Will no one tell me what she sings ? 
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow 
For old, unhappy, far-off things, 
And battles long ago : 



" THE SOLITARY REAPER " 203 

Or is it some more humble lay, 
Familiar matter of to-day ? 
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, 
That has been, and may be again ! 

" What'er the theme, the Maiden sang 
As if her song could have no ending ; 
I saw her singing at her work, 
And o'er the sickle bending ; — 
I listened, motionless and still ; 
And, as I mounted up the hill, 
The music in my heart I bore, 
Loner after it was heard no more." 



Many of Wordsworth's imaginative flights, and these 
the most prized by his admirers, take their start from 
his delight in discovering some new aspect of Nature, 
or in the sudden flash upon bis mind of some reflection 
that had never before inspired a poet. Wordsworth is 
sometimes called a nature-worshipper, but it would be 
more correct to call him a worshipper of the novelties 
of thought that occurred to him in the minute observa- 
tion of nature. The mere delight of the eye, the glory 
of vision, had great charms for him, but greater still 
was the charm of the imaginative exercise to which new 
revelations inspired him. You remember the passage 
in which he describes what first moved him, as early as 
in his fourteenth year, to resolve to be a poet, the sud- 
den conviction flashing upon him that there were many 
things in nature that poets had never observed ? From 
that moment he kept in view, with the persistent obsti- 
nacy of will that was so marked a feature in his charac- 
ter, a definite purpose to supply the deficienc} 7 . And be 
carried out the purpose not merely by what might be 
irreverently called simile-hunting in nature, which many 
of his admirers in prose and verse have done to death, 
never allowing a leaf to cross their path, or a bird to 
sing within their hearing, without putting it on the 



204 WORDSWORTH 

rack to extract a moral from it, or treasuring it up in 
their memories, to be dragged in as after-occasion might 
offer as a rhetorical embellishment. Wordsworth did, 
indeed, labor after new images from nature, and some- 
times, though not often, used them as a rhetorician 
rather than a poet — that is to say, to tickle the fancy 
rather than touch the heart. But often when a new 
aspect of nature touched him, he allowed his imagina- 
tion to dwell upon it, and circle round it, and weave for 
it a metrical body in which it might live among the 
permanent companions of the human spirit. Once, for 
example, as he stood in the twilight among his favorite 
hills, when the gathering gloom had covered over all 
traces of the handiwork of man, and even the transient 
features of the vegetation were dim and indistinct, 
nothing then being visible but the vague outlines of the 
valley, the soft gleam of the lake, and the shadowy 
masses of the mountains, the thought came to him that 
this was the spectacle that had met the eyes of men in 
all ages, had remained constant to human vision through 
all the changes that had passed over the face of nature. 
It was a solemn and affecting thought, and the poet's 
imagination has provided for it a permanent dwelling- 
place in his sonnet to Twilight : 

" Hail, Twilight, sovereign of one peaceful hour ! 
Not dull art thou as undiseerning Night ; 
But studious only to remove from sight 
Day's mutable distinctions. — Ancient Power ! 
Thus did the waters gleam, the mountains lower, 
To the rude Briton, when in wolf-skin vest 
Here roving wild, he laid him down to rest 
On the bare rock, or through a leafy bower 
Looked ere his eyes were closed. By him was seen 
The self-same Vision which we now behold, 
At thy meek bidding, Shadowy Power ! brought forth ; 
These mighty barriers, and the gulf between ; 
The flood, the stars, — a spectacle as old 
As the beginning of the heavens and earth." 



SONNET ON STEAMBOATS 205 

And it was not only in the solitude of hill and valley 
that such thoughts came to him. One of the best 
known of his sonnets is that composed on Westminster 
Bridge. If Wordsworth was not the first poet to 
attempt to express the fact that a more profound feeling 
of stillness and calm is experienced in cities before the 
rush and roar of the day has begun than in the loneliest 
of mountain solitudes, he has given such perfect expres- 
sion to the truth that he is entitled to all the honor of 
the discovery. 

It is a distinctive feature in Wordsworth's nature- 
worship, one that marks him off from lovers of less 
robust and healthy sentiment, that his conception of 
nature Avas wide enough to include the works of man. 

1 He held in theory that nothing was inharmonious in 

1 nature when seen through the right imaginative 
medium ; and though, when the railway threatened his 

1 own Westmoreland retreats, he hurled metrical thunder- 
bolts at the invader, this was in his later years, and 
before that time his imagination had been able to 

l! reconcile the eye to what men of more confined range 
of mental vision can only regard as discordant and 

: unsightly. When we read his sonnet on Steamboats, 
Viaducts, and Railways, composed during the tour of 
1833, we feel convinced that, if he had not been dis- 
turbed from his natural balance by the projected 
Kendal and Windermere Railway, he might have 
found the right imaginative medium through which 
to hear the whistle, and would not have called upon 
the startled mountains, vales, and floods to share 
with him the passion of a just disdain. As this 
sonnet is not generally known, you will pardon me 
for quoting it : 

" Motions and Means, on land and sea at war 
With old poetic feeling, not for this, 
Shall ye by Poets even, be judged amiss ! 
Nor shall your presence, howsoe'er it mar 



206 WORDSWORTH 

The loveliness of Nature, prove a bar 

To the Mind's gaining that prophetic sense 

Of future change, that point of vision, whence 

May be discovered what in soul ye are. 

In spite of all that beauty may disown 

In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace 

Her lawful offspring in Man's art ; and Time, 

Pleased with your triumphs o'er his brother Space, 

Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown 

Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime." 



Before passing from Wordsworth I would recom- 
mend those who wish to give him a trial as a companion 
not to attempt " The Prelude " or " The Excursion " at 
first, but to search about among the shorter poems for 
some congenial spot in which sympathy and admiration 
may take root and develop into intimate enjoyment. 
Matthew Arnold made a selection from the poems, and: 
wrote a preface to them. He is the writer to put you 
in sympathy with Wordsworth, if any human being can. 
It is a fashion to deride the " This will never do," with 
which Jeffrey opened his review of " The Excursion." 
But has it ever done? I have never heard of or 
seen any body prepared to say that "The Excursion" 
can be read with unflagging delight. It contains many 
splendid passages, but the bulk of it many of Words- 
worth's most ardent admirers pass by with indifference,, 
if not with actual repugnance. To take the case ofjj 
Dean Church, for example: there is a manifest incon- 
sistency between what he says of Jeffrey and his own 
comments on " The Excursion." At one place he tells- 
us that the sneers of the Edinburgh Review were in| 
vain, and showed only that the poem was in advance of ! 
the times ; while again, referring to the poem itself, lie 
admits that, though many passages are majestic, we can- 
not speak so highly of their contents, and that the poet 
is at times both pompous and obscure. Jeffrey said 
nothing stronger against "The Excursion" than this,; 



THE LAKE POETS 207 

and the truth is that most of his criticism has been 
amply confirmed and justified. 

And now for a short introduction to Coleridge and a 
shorter to Southey. It was owing to an extraneous 
accident, and not on the ground of any resemblance in 
their character or in their poetic principles, that they 
were spoken of in their lifetime as forming a school 
nicknamed the Lake Poets. Three men more dissimilar 
could not have been found — Wordsworth, absorbed in a 
: definitely conceived poetic mission, living solely for it, 
day after day and year after year alternately opening 
his mind with wise passiveness till an inspiration should 

I seize it, and working with strenuous vigor when the 
inspiration came ; Coleridge, dreamy, speculative, aim- 

II less, rich in poetic and philosophic projects, but poor in 
1 perseverance, an inspired creator of splendid fragments, 

paving with good resolutions the way to slender achieve- 
ment ; Southey, a man of immense intellectual energy 
and copious literary faculty, but no distinctive genius, 
a ready and indefatigable writer, full of ambition and 
self-confidence, writing epics for fame, reviewing articles 
: and books for a livelihood, a professional man of letters 
1 who cheerfully resigned his youthful ambitions to fol- 
low a life of regular methodical production of such 
works as editors and booksellers would contract to 
receive and pay for on delivery, putting fame on one 
1 side except in so far as it was compatible with honest 
labor for the support of his household. The lives of the 
three ran in channels that diverged more and more as 
the streams lengthened. They were too different in 
character ever to have formed a school. Their poetic 
ideals were different. We may doubt whether Southey 
could have ever understood Wordsworth's conception of 
poetry as the imaginative embodiment of personal emo- 
tion ; at any rate, he went a very different way to work, 
ranging through history for subjects likely in them- 



208 COLERIDGE 

selves to impress Lis readers. It may have been that a6 
a practical man, under the imperious necessity of pro- 
ducing what would sell, he felt that he could not afford 
to wait and watch for moments of inspiration, but 
must go in search of subjects capable of impressive 
treatment. This at least was what he did, and his 
poetry has not one quality in common with Words- 
worth's. Rebellion against the tyranny of the couplet, 
it might be said, for Southey threw himself with pre- 
sumptuous energy into metrical experiments, and his 
epics abound in irregular freaks of rhythm. But such 
vagaries were no part of Wordsworth's system, although 
at the time there is no doubt that, forming as they did the 
most superficially striking feature of Southey's " Thai- 
aba," they confirmed the impression that he was leagued 
with Wordsworth and Coleridge in a conspiracy to propa- 
gate the heresies of the Preface to the " Lyrical Ballads." 
It was, in fact, in a review of "Thalaba" in the first 
number of the Edinburgh Review, in 1802, that the 
existence of the Lake School was first proclaimed to the 
world. The reviewer had probably heard that all three 
poets were domiciled in the Lake Countiy, and, looking 
to the obtrusive irregularities of " Thalaba " and the 
startling paradoxes of Wordsworth's poetic gospel, it 
was natural, perhaps, that he should jump to the con- 
clusion that this band of brothers had retired from the 
world to work out in secluded companionship the doc- 
trines of the Preface. It was a circumstance in favor 
of a conclusion recommended by its dramatic effective- 
ness that, some j^ears before, Southey and Coleridge 
had published a volume in conjunction, while Words- 
worth and Coleridge were the joint authors of the 
"Lyrical Ballads." The truth was that Southey was 
not at the time a resident in the Lake Country, though 
Coleridge was established there for the sake of Words- 
worth's companionship, and Coleridge and Southey had 
married sisters, and Mrs. Southey had spent some 



Coleridge's influence on wordsworth 209 

i months with Mrs. Coleridge while Southey, not yet 
settled down to his life-work as a man of letters, was 
) wandering about in vague prospect of diplomatic 
i employment. It was not till 1803 that Southey finally 
resolved to look to literature for a livelihood, and fixed 
i his residence at Greta Hall near Keswick ; and it was 
•i for domestic reasons rather than for the sake of Words- 
)i worth's society that he chose this residence in the Lake 
country — his acquaintance with Wordsworth being, in 
fact, slight, and his sympathy with Wordsworth's 
poetical theories far from intimate. The ordinary cares 
of this world bad a paramount hold on Southey in those 
years, and his foremost anxiety was to find the means 
of reconciling them with his poetic ambition ; far from 
his thoughts was any idea of sharing as a sworn con- 
federate in another man's mission. It was chance, and 
not community of aim or community of sentiment, that 
brought the three poets together in their early man- 
hood. There can be no confederacy without a leader, 
and these three were too strong in their energies and 
distinct in their individualities to submit one to 
another's purposes in life. The links between them 
. were slight and transient, and had all been accidentally 
formed by Coleridge, the man of many projects and 
quickly kindled generous sympathy with the works of 
others, all the freer in its play that he had no very 
definite work of his own. But the contemporary 
"Edinburgh Reviewer" could not be aware of these 
details which have been disclosed to posterity ; and 
several superficial facts were in his favor when he coined 
the nickname of the Lake School. 

Of the three, Coleridge and Wordsworth, though as 
different as possible in character, had most in common 
in their views of poetry. The doctrines of the Preface 
most probably took shape in Wordsworth's mind during 
those long walks and talks with Coleridge in the summer 
of 179V to which I have before alluded. There can be 
14 



210 COLERIDGE 

no doubt that his friendship with Coleridge in their 
early manhood was a most important influence in the 
development of Wordsworth's mental and poetic life. 
There is a marked difference between what he wrote 
before and after. I would even go so far, arguing from 
the precision with which Wordsworth uses psychological 
terms in the Preface, that not a little of his theory was 
consciously or unconsciously derived from Coleridge. 
And the basis of my argument would be this : Words- 
worth was not a reader of philosophy, and he professed 
to detest mental analysis ; yet the analysis of the crea- 
tive faculty in the Preface is at once profound and clear. 
Coleridge, on the other hand, had a passion for philos- 
ophy ; his quick and subtle intellect revelled in its 
intricacies ; it was his delight before poetry even when 
he was a school-boy, and when he was an old man he 
could hardly be brought to converse on any other sub- 
ject. Only the year before lie sought the acquaintance 
of Wordsworth, the first son born to him, the ill-starred 
Hartley Coleridge, had been named after the English 
philosopher whose technical language is used throughout 
Wordsworth's Preface, not without the awkwardness 
and crabbedness that comes from want of familiarity. 
Coleridge was saturated with Hartley's psychology when 
he and Wordsworth first met ; and when he was full of 
a subject, his eloquence about it was unmatchedly rich 
and full. A new Plato would find admirable subjects 
for imaginary dialogues in these conversations between 
Coleridge and Wordsworth when they met almost daily 
for a whole year. Only Plato himself could hardly 
have done justice to the abundance and eloquence, the 
wide discursiveness, of Coleridge's talk. Carlyle saw 
and heard him in his old age, and has left a description 
that is often quoted : 

" I have heard Coleridge talk with eager musical energy two 
stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, and communicate 
no meaning whatsoever to any individual of his hearers, certain 



HIS ELOQUENCE 211 

of whom, I for one, still kept eagerly listening in hope ; the most 
had long before given up and formed, if the room was large 
enough, secondary humming groups of their own. . . You 
swam and fluttered in the mistiest, wide, unintelligible deluge of 
things, for most part in a rather profitless uncomfortable manner. 
Glorious islets too I have seen rise out of the haze, but they were 
few, and soon swallowed in the general element again. Balmy 
sunny islets, islets of the blest, and the intelligible ; — on which 
occasions those secondary humming groups would all cease hum- 
ming and hang breathless upon the eloquent words, till once your 
islet got wrapt in the mist again, and they would recommence 
humming. Eloquent, artistically expansive words, you had 
always ; piercing radiances of a most subtle insight came at 
intervals." 



Part of this unir.telligibility may have been due to 
the listener, for Coleridge in his Highgate da}^s spoke 
in what was to Carlyle an unknown tongue — the philo- 
sophical dialect of modern Germany. Those who knew 
him in his youth heard him converse on more intelligible 
subjects, and speak of his eloquence as a marvel. And 
that his eloquence quickened Wordsworth's whole poetic 
nature, and set him thinking with new energy about 
poetry, I have not the least doubt ; and I think it highly 
probable that the doctrines of the Preface shaped them- 
selves in his mind as he listened to Coleridge's ever- 
flowing talk. In restating some of these doctrines in 
the " Biographia Literaria," with such fulness of illus- 
tration and such explanations and verbal corrections that 
they have become part of the critical creed, Coleridge 
was probably only reclaiming what had once been his 
own. Why, then, you may ask, did he not say so? To 
answer this question is to recall the character of the 
man. Absorbed in a subject one day, and violently 
pouring out his thick-coming thoughts about it, he 
would have not the slightest remembrance of what he 
had said a short time afterward, when another subject 
had taken possession of him. A verbatim report of his 
conversation one year might have been passed off on 



2 1 2 COLEBIDGE 

him next year as the production of another mind. He 
has been accused, and we must admit convicted, of 
extensive plagiarisms both in his poetry and his philos- 
ophy ; if any body had plagiarized from himself, he 
would never have detected the fact. He never paused to 
think what was his and what was not, but gave all his 
powers of memory and imagination to whatever was 
uppermost in his thoughts at the time. I do not say 
that Wordsworth plagiarized from him, but it seems to 
me impossible to overrate the quickening influence that 
Wordsworth owed to his contact with this wonderful 
enthusiast. 

The debt was not all on one side. It was during the 
memorable year of his companionship with Wordsworth 
that Coleridge wrote nearly every thing that now remains 
as a measure of his wonderful poetic gifts. " Tlie 
Rime of the Ancient Mariner " and " Christabel " were 
both written in that year, besides most of the short 
poems that make up the small volume of his poetical 
works. The presence by his side of the steady, resolute 
will of the Westmoreland dalesman seems to have for 
the time constrained his imagination from aimless 
wandering ; and the lofty, unwavering self-confidence of 
his friend inspired him with a similar energy. Away 
from Wordsworth after that year he lost himself in 
visions of work to be done that always remained to be 
done. Coleridge had every poetic gift but one — the 
will for sustained and concentrated effort. 

One cannot help lamenting that the gift of resolute 
will was wanting in Coleridge. And if we make the 
lament for him, it is well founded, for all the second 
half of his life was made unhappy by vainly renewed 
repentances for wasted opportunities. There is not a 
more pathetic poem in the language, to those who know 
the two men, than the poem written by Coleridge when 
his heart was full after hearing Wordsworth recite to 
him " The Prelude " — on the growth of a poet's mind. 



THE CHARM OF COLERIDGE S POETRY 213 

"All, as I listened with a heart forlorn 
The pulses of my being beat anew ; 
And even as life returns upon tbe drown'd 
Life's joy rekindling roused a throng of pains — 
Keen pangs of love, awakening as a babe 
Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart ; 
And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope ; 
And hope that scarce would know itself from fear ; 
Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain ; 
And genius given, aud kuowledge won in vain ; 
And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild, 
And all which patient toil had reared, and all, 
Commune with thee had opened out — but flowers 
Strewed on my corse and borne upon my bier 
In the same coffin, for the self-same grave ! 
That way no more ! and ill beseems it me, 
Who came a welcomer in herald's guise, 
Singing of glory and futurity, 
To wander back on such unhealthful road, 
Plucking the poisons of self-harm ! And ill 
Such intertwine beseems triumphal wreaths 
Strewed before thy advancing ! 

And when — O Friend ! my comforter and guide ! 

Strong in thyself, and powerful to give strength, — 

Thy long-sustained song finally closed, 

And thy deep voice had ceased — yet thou thyself 

Wert still before my eyes, and round us both 

That happy vision of beloved faces — 

Scarce conscious, and yet conscious of its close 

I sate, my being blended in one thought 

(Thought was it ? or aspiration ? or resolve ?) 

Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound — 

And when I rose, I found myself in prayer." 

The charm of Coleridge's poetry is the special and 
inalienable charm of the art, the delight of new and 
melodious combinations. When the poetry is not 
emanative, the movement of the thought is entirely 
governed by feeling. " Christabel " is a fragment of 
most wonderful quality, and exhibits another singular 
feature of Coleridge's poetry — his marvellous power of 
touching the sense of theisupernatural. 



214 SOUTHEY 

It was through Coleridge that Wordsworth made the 
acquaintance of Southey, a man who had very little 
intellectual sympathy with either of the other two mem- 
bers of the supposed Triad of Lake Poets. He was a 
young man of twenty at Balliol College in Oxford when 
Coleridge, always craving for the company of congenial 
comrades, introduced himself. Coleridge, two years 
older, had just broken off a second period of keeping 
terms at Cambridge, and had already had several 
characteristic adventures, the most notable of which 
was the freak of enlisting as a dragoon. He had con- 
tracted some debts at Cambridge, and this was his mode 
of evading his responsibilities. He took the name of 
Silas Thompson Comberbatcli, filling out his own initials 
S. T. C, and, according to the most authentic form of 
the story, was discovered to be something more than he 
seemed by writing a Latin quotation on the wall of the 
stable. When he was discovered, his friends were com- 
municated with, and he obtained his discharge ; but he 
did not take kindly to Cambridge afterward, and when 
he called upon Southey, his head was full of a wild 
scheme for establishing a small community under a new 
form of government in some remote part of America. 
Pantisocracy was to be the name given to this new 
model of a happy state, and the essence of the plan was 
that the members of the small community, having pur- 
chased a tract of land, should raise with their own 
hands the necessaries of life, while their wives — mar- 
riage was indispensable for a Pantisocrat — should look 
after the household and the children. All goods were 
to be in common, and the plan differed from ordinary 
communism only in this, that the men were all to de- 
vote a large part of their time to the cultivation of liter- 
ature. Half the daj^ Coleridge calculated, would suffice 
for the provision of simple food and clothes ; the rest 
was to be given to high thinking and poetry. Though 
Coleridge afterward became the leading mind among 



PANTISOCEACT 215 

the philosophical Tories, and Southey a bitter and 
unscrupulous partisan on the same side, both were then 
enthusiastically stirred by the French Revolution. 
Such was the temper of the youth of the time, excited 
to a degree that we can hardly understand now by this 
startling event, that Coleridge and Southey together suc- 
ceeded in beating up no less than five other recruits. 
We can imagine how Coleridge luxuriated in picturing 
all the advantages of this scheme, the heights to which 
poetry could be carried by minds rendered healthy by 
open-air exercise and freed from all cai'es by the sim- 
plicity of their wants ; we can imagine how, priding 
himself on being above all things a practical man, 
he calculated in exact figures the yield of an aver- 
age man's labor per hour, discussed the allowance to 
be made for the fertility of the virgin soil, compared 
the merits of different regions of the great conti- 
nent, cited facts from the books of travellers, ap- 
portioned the duties of the different members of the 
community, and with eloquent ingenuity argued away 
every difficulty that could be started. But there 
was one difficulty that could not be argued away — 
the want of money. All the recruits of Pantisocracy 
were poor — in fact, absolutely impecunious. The en- 
thusiasts, however, were fertile in resources for provid- 
ing the necessary supply. They so impressed a Bristol 
bookseller, Cottle, a good-hearted, generous man in spite 
of his name, that he gave them money for their poems, 
and promised more. They gave public lectures in 
Bristol on literature, history, and politics, which drew 
crowded audiences, it is said, till one evening Coleridge 
failed to put in an appearance. But with all their 
efforts, — and Coleridge's were probably greater in plan- 
ning than in executing, for he had a rooted aversion to 
regular labor, — with all their efforts, the Pantisocrats 
never raised funds enough to give their system of 
government a chance in practice. Three of them, in- 



216 SOUTHEY 

deed, took one step toward realizing it, by providing 
themselves with wives. There was a family of pretty 
and amiable sisters in Bristol of the name of Flicker, 
and Lovell, Southey, and Coleridge married one each. 
Then an uncle of Southey's intervened, and carried him 
off to Portugal for a time. There the history of Pan- 
tisocracy ends. Southey returned from Portugal with 
other aims, and Coleridge, though angry at first at his 
desertion, soon drifted off contentedly into other engross- 
ing occupations for his fertile imagination. His beset- 
ting sin of irresolution never left him, with the result 
that, on his death in 1834, he left behind him a great 
reputation, but only fragments to support it — fragments, 
however, which fully justified the admiration of his 
contemporaries. 



CHAPTER XV 

CAMPBELL — MOORE 

CAMPBELL — " PLEASURES OF HOPE " — THOMAS MOORE — THE LAST 
OP THE JOCULATORS — MOORE'S SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT — HIS 
JOCOSE AND MAUDLIN VEINS 

The great poets who made the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century famous appeared above the horizon one 
after another in quick succession. In the same year in 
which the volume of "Lyrical Ballads" was issued by 
a Bristol publisher, a poem was published in Edinburgh 
and received throughout the country with much less 
mixed approbation. This was the "Pleasures of 
Hope," the work of a still younger man than either 
Wordsworth or Coleridge, Thomas Campbell, a youth 
of one-and-twenty, uncertain at the time as to his career, 
and himself alternating so violently between despair 
and hope when he thought of the future that his 
friends were disposed at times to doubt his sanity. It is 
significant that both these publications of the dawn of a 
new period came from the provinces. In Campbell's 
work, which is known to every school-boy and school-girl 
in lines and extracts, but which nobody reads now as a 
whole except under some other compulsion than the 
fascination of the poetry, there were no signs of a dis- 
position to break with the past either in form or in 
choice of subject. Akenside, fifty years before, had 
sung the " Pleasures of the Imagination," and Samuel 
Rogers, following him, had in 1793 sung the "Pleasures 
of Memory," and the happy thought occurred to young 
Campbell, suggested apparently by a jocular passage in 
a friend's letter, of continuing the series. Hope was in 

217 



218 CAMPBELL 

like manner personified, and apostrophized, and glori- 
fied as a beneficent principle, with illustrations drawn 
from savage life and from civilized life — from the 
whole range of history and the whole circle of the arts 
and the sciences. So far there was an intenser per- 
sonal feeling at the beginning of Campbell's poem, 
inasmuch as he had little pleasure in life except the 
pleasure of hope when the subject occurred to him ; but 
this feeling had but little shaping influence on the com- 
position. The successive incidents in the poem do not 
follow in any natural train of excited, impassioned 
reflection ; they might have been treated separately and 
fitted together by mechanical forces, the principle of 
arrangement being the rhetorical principle of affording 
variety to the reader. The versification and the diction 
imitated the most approved models of the eighteenth 
century ; there are passages that recall Goldsmith, and 
passages that recall Pope. Darwin, the author of the 
"Botanic Garden," is generally regarded as having 
carried the style of Pope and Goldsmith to ridiculous 
excess. There was sufficient freshness in Campbell's 
work as a whole to save him from this reproach. The 
whole work gives an impression of abundant intellectual 
power and abundant poetic sensibility. Yet bits might 
be taken from the "Botanic Garden" and bits from 
the " Pleasures of Hope," and when they were put side 
by side, a reader familiar with both writers would find 
it difficult to decide which was Campbell's and which 
was Darwin's. 

Campbell afterward did much better work than the 
"Pleasures of Hope"; and there is a story told of his 
state of mind just before its publication that illustrates 
better than volumes of commentary how this most 
approved style in which he wrote was beginning to pall 
even on those who could not see their way to a better. 
While he was engaged in revising the proofs of it, he 
one evening entered the rooms of a friend of his, who 



THE POET'S EXCITABLE TEMPERAMENT 219 

has recorded the circumstance, sat down before the fire 
with a face of angry discontent, and without speaking 
a word took up the poker and began tracing figures in 
the soot on the back of the chimney. Presently he 
turned round and addressed his astonished friend in the 
most insulting language. Not being answered accord- 
ing to his foll} T , he turned after a time upon what 
proved to be the source of his strange behavior, his own 
poem. He had been reading the proofs of it all day, 
mending and polishing the lines till all meaning seemed 
to have gone out of them, and the whole composition 
struck him as trash. "There are days," he went on, 
" when I can't abide to walk in the sunshine, and when 
I would almost rather be shot than come within the 
sight of any man, to be spoken to by any mortal. This 
has been one of those days. How heartily I wished for 
night." He spent the evening with his friend, and 
after some hours the fit of despondency was followed 
by a fit of wild mirth, in which he proclaimed his 
assurance that the poem would make him at once a 
great man, and gravely decided how and where he 
should live when this greatness was achieved. 

It would be easy to make too much of such violent 
fluctuations of mood in a sensitive youth, unstrung and 
distempered by overwork as Campbell then was. But 
we may well contrast this sensitive uncertainty and the 
steady, assured confidence with which about the same 
time Wordsworth and Coleridge were putting in execu- 
tion their definitely conceived poetic ideals. One of 
them at least, the one who did most solid work, had no 
alternations between extravagant self-confidence and 
extravagant despair. With all allowance for Campbell's 
temperament and circumstances, I should be inclined to 
attribute a large part of his faltering and misgiving and 
impatience with his own work to his perceiving by fits 
and starts that this elaborately contrived fabric of finely 
ornamented shreds and patches embodied an artificial 



220 CAMPBELL 

sentiment, and did not express feelings to which he 
longed to give vent. He was a man of quick and strong 
feelings, but in his expression of them he was hampered 
by respect for the decayed gentility of literary tradition. 
He was afraid to move freely in the dress of elevated 
diction sanctioned by Pope's authority as de rigueur the 
poet's raiment ; he was too self-conscious of it ; the 
thought of how his feelings would look in it trammelled 
their natural movements. 

The truth is that beneath the smooth and glossy 
artificial Popian crust of the " Pleasures of Hope " there 
was more in it of the spirit of the French Revolution 
than we find either in Wordsworth or in Coleridge, j 
The literary revolution, of which they were recognized I 
leaders, was a thing altogether apart from the political j 
revolution, not in any direct way inspired by it — the j 
result of a quite independent chain of causes ; in fact, j 
as I have tried to show, not, strictly speaking, a revolu- 
tion at all, but a natural literary development, the roots ] 
of which lay chronologically behind the political revolu- 
tion. But Campbell was directly influenced in the tone; 
of the thoughts that he expressed in verse by the politi- i 
cal circumstances of his time. His restless ambitious 
spirit, by turns discontented and sanguine, and at all 
times intense^ sympathetic, had more in common with, 
the spirit then acting on public affairs than either thei 
hard, self-contained Wordsworth or the dreamy and| 
speculative Coleridge — of imagination and speculation 
all compact, and comparatively indifferent to the 
material on which his faculties worked. It is curious 
to trace the operation of two antagonistic forces in: 
Campbell's mind — the habit of elevated and elaborate 
expression, formed at the Univershy, in accordance with 
the literary tradition of Pope, and the tempestuous 
energy of feeling fostered by the disturbed state of 
public affairs. He was quite a model student in thej 
University of Glasgow, standing high as a scholar in his; ; 



THE " PLEASURES OF HOPE " 221 

classes, and winning prizes for English verse with poems 
that were pronounced by the professors far superior to 
any thing ever submitted in such competitions. He 
wrote an " Essay on the Origin of Evil " in the style of 
Pope's " Essay on Man " that was considered an incom- 
parable imitation of the great original. But Campbell 
was also a leader in debating societies outside the 
regular University course ; and there, as was natural, 
the principles of the political revolution found many 
enthusiastic supporters. You know, I dare say, that in 
the nineties of last century attempts to apply the 
doctrines of liberty, equality, and fraternity were sup- 
pressed in Scotland with extraordinary severity. Three 
gentlemen, — Palmer, Gerald, and Muir, — in whose mem- 
ory' a monument now stands in the Calton Burying- 
ground, were transported to Botany Bay for an offence 
in the way of agitation which, under the English law, 
was punishable only with a short term of imprisonment. 
Campbell, when a boy of sixteen, walked all the way 
from Glasgow to hear one of these men, Gerald, a man 
of remarkable eloquence, defend himself on his trial. 
The speech and the subsequent conviction made a great 
impression on the sensitive youth — so great an impres- 
sion that his friends thought it had unsettled his reason, 
such was the passion with which he spoke against modern 
society and all its institutions. Now, underneath the 
smooth couplets and the dignified diction and imagery 
of the " Pleasures of Hope" it is not difficult to detect 
traces of this deep-seated passion, when Ave know the 
poet's early history, disguised though it is by the con- 
ventional splendor of the expression. There is,_ for 
example, the famous passage on the Russian subjugation 
of Poland, and another, not so familiar, at the close of 
Part I., where he denounces the plunder of. India, by 
Warren Hastings : 

" Rich in the gems of India's gaudy zone, 
And plunder piled from kingdoms not their own, 



222 CAMPBELL 

Degenerate trade ! thy minions could despise 
The heart-born anguish of a thousand cries ; 
Could lock with impious hands their teeming store, 
While famished nations died along the shore ; 
Could mock the groans of fellow-men, and bear 
The curse of kingdoms peopled with despair ; 
Could stamp disgrace on man's polluted name, 
And barter, with their gold, eternal shame ! " 

Or, again, the following : 

" Tyrants ! in vain ye trace the wizard ring ; 
In vain ye limit mind's unwearied spring : 
What ! can ye lull the winged winds asleep, 
Arrest the rolling world, or chain the deep ? 
No ! — the wild wave contemns your sceptred hand ; 
It rolled not back when Canute gave command." 

The literary quality of such verses is not high; in aim- 
ing at elevated diction the young poet approaches 
perilously near to turgid bombast. Yet in these verses 
the spirit of the French Revolution speaks more plainly 
than in any of the productions of Wordsworth or Cole- 
ridge. They were disenchanted, disillusionized, before 
they wrote about the French Revolution. If we could l 
recover any of Coleridge's lectures on Pantisocracy, we ; 
might find something like the above. Campbell, we 
must remember, was only twenty-one when he wrote the 
"Pleasures of Hope"; and, though he pointed his moral 
specially against Russian tyranny in Poland, there shines/ 
through his verse unmistakable evidence of sympathy 
with the motives and aspirations of revolutionists else- 
where. The dress was the dress of Pope, but the voice i 
was the voice of a later time. 

To the force of the habit of expression in which he 
had been educated I should also be disposed to attribute 
Campbell's strange distrust of the poems that have been 
universally recognized as his best and most enduring 
work — "Ye Mariners of England," " Hohenlinden," 
" The Soldier's Dream," the " Battle of the Baltic," and; 



Campbell's diffidence 223 

a few others. He contributed these poems to the 
Morning Chronicle after he had made a reputation 
by the " Pleasures of Hope," and before he settled in 
London to the more commonplace literary labor in 
which he spent the rest of his life. So doubtful was 
Campbell of the value of these lyrics that he would not 
put bis name to them, for fear of compromising the 
reputation of the author of the " Pleasures of Hope." 
Now, I should say it was a result of the ideas of literary 
dignity in which he had been brought up that Campbell 
should have feared that "Hohenlinden " and "Ye Mar- 
iners of England " would appear too trifling for a poet 
of the rank that his first poem gave him. It was an ex- 
ample of the force of the same restraint of habit that 
kept Gray from " speaking out." Like Gray, Campbell 
lacked the courage of his imagination. The incubus of 
literary tradition lay heavy on him. He had a distrust- 
ful critic within, the creation of scholastic training, 
which clung to the skirts of his imagination and impeded 
its freedom of movement whenever it tried to burst 
away from the beaten track. His diffidence about 
" Hohenlinden " is sometimes quoted as an example of 
the saw that "genius is unconscious of its own excel- 
lence." But against this must be set the fact that late 
in life Campbell considered that "O'Connor's Child" 
was his best poem, and that in this he has the support 
of most people who are familiar with his poetry. It is 
unlike his popular lyrics, in the fact that it takes more 
than one reading to appreciate, but it is worth the trou- 
ble of reading more than once. Some think that if 
"Gertrude of Wyoming" had been published before the 
" Pleasures of Hope " it might have ranked as his chief 
work, but the subject is too remote to have achieved 
any great amount of popularity. 

The year after the publication of the " Pleasures of 
Hope," another young poetic adventurer, an Irishman, 



224 MOORE 

crossed St. George's Channel with his bundle of MSS. in 
search of a publisher and subscribers in London. The 
MSS. in his case were only metrical translations from a 
Greek poet, Anacreon, artificial verses in praise of love 
and wine. Yet in a few months this adventurer, though 
he was only just out of his teens, and his father was 
nothing more eminent than a humble Dublin grocer in 
a small shop in a small street, became one of the lions 
of London society, and numbered the Prince of Wales 
among the subscribers to a sumptuous edition of his 
translations. From that time forward he held a place 
among the most popular poets of his generation. Pub- 
lishers, whose business it is to gauge the public estima- 
tion of writers, furnish a sure test of popularity at least, 
however much that may be at variance with critical 
verdict, in the prices that they are willing to pay for 
poems. And even after Byron bad appeared in the field, 
when Mr. Perry of the Morning Chronicle was negoti- 
ating as a friend with the Longmans the sale of a work 
by Thomas Moore, he was in a position to stipulate that 
the price should be as high as had ever been paid for 
a poem of the same length. The poem was not then 
written or even planned : it was only understood that 
the subject should be Oriental; and this was the rate of 
remuneration for which Moore's friend bargained. For 
so many lines, to be paid for on delivery, the poet was to 
receive three thousand pounds. Scott was paid this sum 
for " Rokeby," and Perry argued that Moore could not 
take less. The publishers assented, thereby showing 
that Moore at the time was, in their opinion, as popular 
with the buyers of poetry as Scott. 

If we were to look for the secret of Moore's popu- 
larity in his poetry alone, we should be doing an injus- 
tice both to him and to the taste of the generation with 
whom he was such a favorite. He was personally 
popular ; he impressed society otherwise than by his 
poems ; these were but a part of his claims to admiring 



THE SECBET OF MOORE'S POPULARITY 225 

recognition. If we open a collection of bis poems now, 
and read his "Odes of Anaoreon," to which the Prince 
of Wales and other notabilities of rank subscribed, we 
desist after a time with something of the disgust we 
should feel at a profuse display of pretty, sham jewelry. 
The ample brimming bowls and goblets of wine, the 
wreaths and garlands of roses, the rich perfumes, the 
sparkling eyes, and the golden tresses, and the snowy 
necks, are well enough in moderation, but some eighty 
odes of such materials pall for lack of variety. Any 
variety that there is lies within the narrowest limits : 
now it is a bowl and now it is a goblet, now we drink and 
now we quaff, now it is a bud and now it is a full-blown 
rose, now a garland and now a cluster, now ringlets and 
now tresses ; but it is always wine and flower, with 
little variation of phrase. We are soon surfeited with 
such sentiment, and disposed to laugh at its artificiality. 
Moore's prettinesses, always expressed in soft and melo- 
dious verse, were probably a pleasant surprise to a gen- 
eration weary of didactic poems ; but if we have a 
liking for such things now, we can find more genuine 
articles of the same kind, compounded with much higher 
art, in the poetry of the seventeenth century, the vol- 
umes of Queen Henrietta's poets, Lovelace, and Carew, 
and Suckling, and, above all, Herrick. 

Nor were his original poems, published soon after 
under the pseudonym of Tom Little, in the least of 
higher quality. They were little poems, indeed, gener- 
ally spun up to some glittering conceit, as commonplace 
as it is glittering. No poet of the eighteenth century, 
in the days when the great patrons of poetry were con- 
noisseurs of the art, would have dared to submit effu- 
sions so very poor in thought, and vulgar in sentiment. 
There is a poem on Variety, for example. Variety is 
the great charm of nature. 

"Ask what prevailing, pleasing power, 
Allures the sportive, wandering bee 

15 



226 MOORE 

To roam untired from flower to flower, 
He'll tell you 'tis variety. 

" Look Nature round, her features trace, 
Her seasons, all her changes see ; 
And own, upon Creation's face, 
The greatest charm's variety." 

Therefore, following nature's law, the poet will seek 
variety. But no : there is " the nymph he loves," 
this is " Patty " ; lie can never be false to her. 

' ' For me, ye gracious powers above ! 
Still let me roam, unfixed and free ; 
In all things — but the nymph I love, 
I'll change and taste variety. 

"But Patty, not a world of charms 

Could e'er estrange my heart from thee ; 
No, let me ever seek those arms : 
There still I'll find variety." 

What poor stuff is this compared with Lovelace's "Para- 
dox," of which it is a Brummagem imitation : 

" 'Tis true the beauteous star, 
To which I first did bow, 
Burnt quicker, brighter far 
Than that which leads me now, 

"Which shines with more delight, 
For gazing on that light 
So long, near lost my sight. 

" Through foul, we follow fair. 
For had the world one face, 
And earth been bright as air, 
We had known neither place. 
Indians smell not their nest, 
A Swiss or Finn tastes best 
The spices of the East. 

" So from the glorious sun, 

Who to his bright hath got, 



IMITATION OF LOVELACE'S " PARADOX " 227 

With what delight we run 
To some black cave or grot. 
And, heavenly Sidney, you 
Twice read, had rather view 
Some odd romance, so new. 

" The god that constant keeps 
Unto his deities, 
Is poor in joys, and sleeps 
Imprisoned in the skies. 

This knew the wisest, who 
From Juno stole below 
To love a bear or cow." 

We have seen Moore in his jocosely sentimental vein ; 
see him next in his maudlin love-sickness. 

" Have you not seen the timid tear 

Steal trembling from mine eye ? 
Have you not marked the flush of fear, 

Or caught the murmured sigh ? 
And can you think my love is chill, 

Nor fixed on you alone ? 
And can you rend by doubting still 

A heart so much your own ? 

" To you my soul's affections move 

Devoutly, warmly true ; 
My life has been a task of love, 

One long, long thought of you. 
If all your tender faith be o'er, 

If still my truth you'll try ; 
Alas ! I know but one proof more, 

I'll bless your name and die." 

Such are fair specimens of the poems of Tom Little, 
so famous in their day, and if we take them as they read, 
after making all allowance for the novelty of the strain 
when they appeared, and for the very slight interest in 
poetry and consequent want of discrimination in London 
society at the time, we cannot but be astonished that the 
author should have jumped at once into a foremost place, 
even although Wordsworth and Coleridge had so much 



228 MOORE 

against them as candidates for general favor, and Scott 
and Byron had not yet appeared on the scene. But 
the truth is that it was as a writer of songs to be sung, 
and not of poems to be read, that Moore established his 
hold on the public mind; and he was greatly helped by 
his personal popularity in the circles where the fashion 
was set even in poetry. Many in those days would buy 
and admire even a volume of poetry when the name of 
the Prince of Wales appeared at the head of the list 
of subscribers. But how did Moore, who was not born 
in a palace, but in a back street in Dublin, achieve such 
fashionable popularity that he secured the Prince's 
name for his literary venture ? It was chiefly his ex- 
quisite singing of his own songs that made him the 
rage. It is hardly an exaggeration to describe Moore 
as the last of the Troubadours, or, to be more precise, 
as the last of the Joglars, of the men to whom Bishop 
Percy, by a slight historical error, gave the name of 
Minstrels. These were, as I dare say you have heard, a 
class of men in the Middle Ages who sometimes attached 
themselves to a court, and sometimes wandered from 
one feudal castle to another, welcome guests wherever 
they went on account of their skill in making and re- 
citing or singing poems, and other entertaining quali- 
ties. When they were not gentlemen born, and rich 
enough to amuse themselves as well as their hosts in 
this way, they owed their livelihood to the bounty of 
their patrons, often receiving valuable presents. They 
were entitled to be called Troubadours or Inventors if 
their own poetry was excellent ; and if they could only 
render the poetiy of others, their professional name was 
Joglar or Joculator. The joglar added other entertain- 
ing resources to that of reciting poetry; he carried 
gossip from castle to castle, and sometimes was capable 
of amusing his audience with sleight of hand tricks. 
Of course the joglar might also be a troubadour. As 
civilization developed and society became more complex, 



THE LAST OF THE JOCULATORS 229 

there was a natural division of labor ; the poet was 
differentiated as such, and often received his reward 
and his means of livelihood in pensions from the public 
exchequer and sinecure posts in the public service. We 
see this differentiation in full force in the time of 
Chaucer. Now, Moore might be called the last of the 
troubadours or the joglars in our country, partly because 
he made a poetic reputation b} r singing his own songs in 
fashionable drawing-rooms, and partly because he was 
the last eminent English poet who looked to his poetry 
as an indirect means of obtaining a provision for life 
through the public patronage of influential friends. In 
later life, when he wrote a fragment of autobiographj', 
he speaks of his pen as having been bis sole means of 
support throughout his life. It was his means of sup- 
port from necessity, and not from choice ; it was so 
only after he had been disappointed in his expectations 
from another source ; and even then it was so only par- 
tially. For the first twelve years of his London life 
Moore made comparatively little by his pen ; indeed, 
he wrote very little, only two small volumes of elegant 
and sparkling trifles. His chief steady source of income 
was an annuity of five hundred pounds, paid him by 
the publisher Power for supplying words to Irish and 
other national melodies. Moore used to sing them in 
the drawing-rooms of his fashionable friends to give 
them a start. We must, of course, call the composition 
of these literary work, although many of them seem 
poor enough if they are read, and not sung. Anyhow, 
they were handsomely paid for, the poet receiving his 
annuity for them for twenty-seven years — pleasant 
contrast to the melancholy case of Burns, who refused 
to take any thing for a similar seiwice to a Scotch pub- 
lisher, the service, of course, not being really worth so 
much, seeing that Burns's songs were not fashionable 
songs, expensively published. But Moore had another 
source of income, in no way connected with his pen — a 



230 MOORE 

sinecure office in the Bermudas which, after the first 
year, he was able to discharge hj a deputy. He received 
this appointment in 1803, and, though it afterward proved 
a source of embarrassment to him, owing to the rascality 
of a deputy for whose embezzlements he was held re- 
sponsible, it brought him four hundred pounds a year for 
eighteen years. For twelve years Moore, upon these re- 
sources, lived in London the life of a diner-out in the 
greatest request, in expectation of some appointment 
more lucrative than his West India registrarship. These 
expectations, and his chagrin at their repeated postpone- 
ment and ultimate ruin in 1812, are very frankly confessed 
in his Diary. Swift's saying that great men never re- 
ward in a more substantial way those whom they make 
the companions of their pleasures was verified in the 
case of Moore. One of his earliest patrons, on whom he 
all along built his best hopes, was Lord Moira, a schol- 
arly peer, of generous but hesitating and irresolute 
temper, munificent almost to the point of ostentation, 
and specially willing to befriend men of genius and 
learning. He was in power in the Granville Administra- 
tion of 1806, and again in the Liverpool Administration 
of 1812, under which he went out as Governor-General 
to India ; but on neither occasion was he able to do 
any thing for the poet. It is somewhat comical now to 
read Moore's complaints of his hard lines in not being 
promoted to some lucrative post, without the slightest 
qualification for filling it. He evidently regarded him- 
self as having been very badly used by his aristocratic 
friends, and especially by Lord Moira, from whom he 
had expected better things. He repeats bitterly Lord 
Moira's constant assurance when he gave any hint of 
impatience : " I am not oblivious of you. Depend upon 
it, I am not oblivious of you." The fact seems to have 
been that Moira hesitated between posts that he consid- 
ered not good enough to offer to Moore, and posts for 
which, though they were good enough, he was obviously 



HIS INTRODUCTION TO LONDON SOCIETY 231 

unfitted ; and tlms Moore in the end got the allowance of 
poor Mother Hubbard's dog — nothing, and was obliged 
to fall back on literature for a livelihood. 

"How it was," Mrs. Oliphant says, "that the little 
Irishman from Dublin, who came across the Channel 
with a few introductions and some translations from 
Anacreon in his pocket, scrambled into good society, it 
is somewhat difficult to make out." It is difficult indeed, 
if we think only of the social interval between his 
father's little shop in Dublin, which the poet euphemisti- 
cally calls a wine-store, and the fashionable drawing- 
rooms in which he so quickly became a favorite. But 
his fragment of autobiograph} 7 , which ends with his 
introduction to London society, and looks as if it had 
been written to explain the paradox, shows him to us in 
intermediate stages, through which the transition was 
as easy and natural as any other process of evolution. 
Young Moore and his songs were the rage in the best 
society of Dublin before they were the rage in the best 
society in London, and there were links between the 
two along which the modern troubadour slid in the 
easiest manner possible, making good his footing in the 
new fields of social conquest by the same agreeable, 
entertaining qualities that had served him in the city 
of his birth. " In anecdote, small-talk, and especially 
in singing, he was supreme — for many years he had 
been the most brilliant man in his company," says Henry 
Crabb Robinson of him in his famous London days. 
He had shown the same supremacy, and asserted it with 
the same good-sense, modesty, and quiet dignity, before 
he left Dublin. But how did he acquire the tone of 
polite metropolitan society in anecdote, small-talk, and 
singing? Irishmen, from their geniality, frankness, 
love of fun, and general willingness to please and be 
pleased, are naturally agreeable companions : but what 
amuses in the back-parlor of a Dublin wine-store could 
not reasonably be expected to amuse a more fastidious 



232 MOORE 

audience with different interests and different ways of 
life. The autobiography, however, explains this puzzle 
also. Moore's mother was his presiding good genius, 
and it is one of the finest traits in a character that has 
many lovable features that to the last he retained his 
affection for her, and among all his fine friends never 
lost an opportunity of making her life pleasant. " It 
was from the first," he says, " my poor mother's ambi- 
tion, though with no undue aspirings for herself, to 
secure for her children an early footing in the better 
walks of society ; and to her constant attention to this- 
object I owe both my taste for good company and the 
facility I afterward found in adapting myself to that 
sphere." She was helped in this purpose by the religion 
of the family. They were Roman Catholics, and, as 
always happens with a proscribed sect, there was a close 
union between their various ranks. We have seen how 
the same circumstance operated in the life of Pope. It 
was easier for Mrs. Moore to get her children into the 
better walks of society than if she had been a Protestant. 
The future poet was a lively and precocious child, and 
social superiors began to covet his company at a very 
early age. Decayed gentlewomen, punctiliously correct 
in manners, yet gay and sprightly in conversation, as 
only Irish maiden ladies can be, made much of him as 
an engaging prodigy, and invited him to their tea-parties. 
He was sent to the best school in Dublin ; and school- 
fellows, whose fathers were richer than his own, invited 
him to spend the vacations at their homes. Although 
the conspiracy of the United Irishmen was being formed 
at the time in the Irish capital, there was no outward 
sign of discontent; life went merrily with singing- 
parties, dancing-parties, and supper-parties. There 
"was a rage, too, at the time for private theatricals ; and 
Moore's school-master, as it happened, was a leader in 
such entertainments, managing the stage, writing pro- 
logues and epilogues, and giving lessons in elocution. 



" LAI.LA ROOK II " 233 

In the art of recitation Moore was Lis show-boy, and 
when he was eleven years old, was selected to speak 
the epilogue in a performance of " Jane Shore " at the 
private theatre of a Lady Borrowes — the first of the 
many women of title who figure in the story of the 
poet's life. Then, fortunately for him, just as he was 
fourteen and ready for the University, the prohibition 
against Catholics was removed, and he was admitted 
to Trinity College. There he distinguished himself by 
his facility in writing English verse, and made more 
acquaintances in "the better walks of society." By this 
time, too, he had begun to write songs as well as to sing 
them ; and as he always sang to his own accompaniment 
on the piano, and came, as he says, to be dependent on 
it, he was saved thereby from the solicitations of jolly 
good fellows to join companies where there was no such 
instrument, while he was all the greater an acquisition 
in the "better walks." He had also the run of a large 
library, where he acquired a great store of miscellaneous 
scholarship which secured him the attention of the Prov- 
ost of the College. " The Provost's house," he says, 
"was the resort of the best society in Dublin, and his 
wife and daughters were lovely, literary, and fond of 
music." Thus it happened that before he left Dublin, 
at the age of nineteen, to enter at the Middle Temple in 
London and get his Anacreon published, Moore, though 
only the son of the keeper of a wine-store, had been 
expressly invited to dinner to meet no less a person than 
Lord Clare, the Chancellor of the University. He was 
coveted by the best society then, as afterward, for his 
own qualities as an agreeable, well-bred companion. 

Of all his writings it is still to the songs that we must 
go to know him at his best. The Oriental charms of 
" Lalla Rookh " become tiresome as Ave get older, and 
as we begin to look critically at the art of the com- 
position. The poem was not composed in a poetic 
spirit, and there is very little poetry in it. It is rather 



234 MOORE 

an artificial putting together of words and imagery 
than real poetry, and it was felt as such by his contem- 
poraries. They enlarged on the wonderful fidelity of 
his pictures to life, and, like Sir John Malcolm, could 
hardly believe that the poet had not been in the East. 
This is not, however, a strictly poetical quality. Moore 
deliberately set himself to read up his subject, and in 
the poem he used imagery only that would be intel- 
ligible to an Oriental. Had he been writing poetry for 
Orientals, this would have been all right, but it is all 
wrong for us, and Moore had to burden his poem with 
explanatory notes. 

The last years of his life were spent in writing a 
History of Ireland, now quite unknown. He persisted 
in this work, and this gives us a higher idea of his 
character. With all his apparent affectation he was a 
genuine patriot, an industrious worker, and a most ex- 
emplary son and husband, and there is no doubt that it 
was these qualities that helped to make him the darling 
of the London drawing-rooms. 



CHAPTER XVI 

SCOTT 
INFLUENCE OP OLD BALLADS— SUMMARY OP LIFE — POEMS 

Although the French Revolution, in my opinion, had 
no influence on our poets, beyond, perhaps, making them 
feel a certain exaltation of energy as belonging to a 
time of great events, — an impulse that would carry no- 
body far except along a road on which he was prepared 
otherwise to travel,— it is worth noticing that all the 
eminent poets of the time had personal experience, 
more or less accidental, of the consequences of the 
Revolution. The consequences, in fact, were so wide- 
spread throughout the length and breadth of the coun- 
try that it was difficult for any body to avoid encoun- 
tering them at one turn or another. The adventure of 
Wordsworth and Coleridge was the most curious ; but 
all were characteristic of the time of suspicion, espion- 
age, conspiracy, prosecution, and preparation in self- 
defence brought upon this country by fears of a similar 
domestic revolution, and of invasion from our aggres- 
sive revolutionized neighbor. Coleridge had rendered 
himself a suspicious character by his Pantisocracy and 
his "Watchman"; and when he and Wordsworth were 
living near each other in Somersetshire in 1797, with- 
out any ostensible occupation or means of livelihood, a 
spy was sent to watch their movements, and dog them 
in their walks on the Quantock Hills. This worthy, as 
might have been expected, could make little of any 
conversation in which the metaphysical Coleridge had 
the lead ; but one day, as the story goes, they were 
talking of Spinoza, and as the spy happened to have a 

235 



236 scott 

very red nose, and laughter sometimes accompanied the 
mention of Spinoza's name, he thought they were 
poking fun at him, and reported accordingly. Camp- 
bell, we have seen, came across the consequences of the 
French Revolution in the trial of Gerald for trying to 
spread revolutionary principles in Scotland. Moore had 
personal experience of other consequences, more than 
one of his college friends in Dublin being concerned in 
the conspiracy of the United Irishmen, a direct result 
of the establishment of the Republic in France. And 
Scott also felt the whiff and wind of the world-shaking 
event, though in a different way. In the 3'ear in which 
Wordsworth and Coleridge were holding their memora- 
ble conversations on the Quantock Hills (in 1*797), 
Scott, a young Edinburgh lawyer, was enrolled as 
quartermaster of the Ro}<al Mid-Lothian Regiment of 
Cavalry, a body of volunteers raised to defend the 
country when the new Republic began to give evidence 
of an aggressive disposition. At the very time when 
the two Lake poets were discussing the principles of 
ballad composition, and carrying them out each in his 
own way, Scott was galloping on the sands at Mussel- 
burgh, also intent on ballads, chanting fragments of old 
ballads to the rhythm of his horse's motion, and making 
new ballads as he plunged through the fresh sea air, 
and re-enacting in imagination the feats of ancient 
chivalry. 

There is much martial spirit in Scott's poetry, and it 
is likely, as he himself believed, that his battle-scenes 
owe something of their freshness and force to his ex- 
perience in the saddle of the Mid-Lothian Yeomanry. 
When a glass of water is on the point of freezing, a 
touch with a wire will transform it, as if by magic, into 
a bundle of icy crystals ; and it is possible that Scott 
was shaken into poetry by the warlike excitement of 
galloping about directing the manoeuvres of his volun- 
teers. But just as the crystallization of the freezing 



SOURCE OF MARTIAL SPIRIT IN SCOTT's POEMS 237 

water is determined by its previous condition, so was 
the direction of Scott's poetry determined before he had 
his interest in chivalry quickened by taking part in 
military manoeuvres. It was this previous poetic educa- 
tion, in fact, that made him take such a keen delight in 
the mimicry of war, and amidst the bustle and galloping 
to and fro realize how the ancient knight felt when 
pricking on the plain in search of adventures, or spur- 
ring his horse into the thick of a battle. 

When we find men so very different in character 
and circumstances as Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and 
Scott, men reared in London, in Westmoreland, in Edin- 
burgh, all simultaneously interested in one kind of com- 
position, we may be sure that it is somehow in the 
air. The interest in ballad literature in England was 
first made acute by the publication of Bishop Percy's 
" Reliques." I have already mentioned the date of this 
publication, 1765. Such things are the great events of 
literary history ; they are to it what treaties and laws 
are to political history ; and their dates must be remem- 
bered if we are to understand those great movements of 
which they mark the beginnings. Scott first got hold 
of this collection of ballads when he was a boy of 
thirteen, and he has described the effect produced upon 
him. "The summer day," he says, "sped onward so 
fast that, nothwithstanding the sharp appetite of thir- 
teen, I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with 
anxiety, and was still found entranced in my intellectual 
banquet." How was the mental soil prepared for this 
enthusiastic reception ? It is not every boy of thirteen 
that can become so absorbed in a book as to forget his 
dinner. Scott, it is needless to say, was not an ordinary 
boy. As a school-boy he was not brilliant in the regular 
task-work. He seems to have obstinately refused to 
learn Greek, and, it is said, was nicknamed by an 
irritable master the Greek dunce ; and his position in 
the Latin class is described by himself as having been 



238 SCOTT 

meteoric, varying rapidly between top and bottom. It 
was not, indeed, till lie reached the higher classes, 
where the master, Dr. Adams, the author of the well- 
known book on Roman antiquities, taught something 
more than the mere syntax of the language, that Scott 
ever moved far from the less honorable position. He 
rose when questions were asked outside the' prescribed 
lessons, and fell slowly and surely when the course of 
questioning returned to the grammar. The secret 
seems to have been that, owing to bad health, he had 
been rather irregularly educated, and at a very early 
age had formed habits of reading ornnivorously for him- 
self, and was too much absorbed in his own reading to 
have much interest or much memory to spare for the 
niceties of Latin construction. About the time when 
Perc} T 's ballads fell in his way, he was confined to bed 
for several weeks by a serious illness, and one of the 
doctor's prescriptions for him was that he should be 
allowed to read as much as he liked, the consequence 
being that he read through the greater part of a cir- 
culating library in the neighborhood — novels, romances, 
books of travel, histories. The out-of-the-wajr knowl- 
edge got in this manner, and retained in a memory that 
was always singularly powerful, enabled him to occa- 
sionally delight the antiquarian rector of the High 
School, and redeem the disgrace incurred by the inex- 
actness of his knowledge of the classical languages. 
The future novelist was, in fact, educating himself, 
unconsciously, but not the less assiduously and effec- 
tively, for his work in life. His appetite for ballads 
had been specially whetted before he fell to at Percy's 
" Reliques" with such eagerness. His ancestors came 
from the great ballad country, the Borders ; and some 
of them had furnished themes for the ballad-singer. 
His father was a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh, 
and his mother the daughter of a Professor ; but he 
was the lineal descendant of a Border chief, " "Wat or 



THE CLAN SCOTT 239 

Walter Scott of Harden, whose wife was celebrated in 
song as the Flower of Yarrow. She was the lady who, 
according to tradition, was in the habit of serving up 
at table, when provisions ran short, a dish of spurs — a 
signal that he must take horse and borrow a few cattle 
and other eatables from English neighbors on the 
other side of the Border. The clan Scott occupied 
a prominent place in Border history, and numbered in 
its various ranks not a few heroes of the persuasion and 
calling of Robin Hood and Little John." One of 
Scott's earliest and favorite books was a history of this 
''right honourable clan," "gathered out of ancient 
chronicles, histories, and traditions of our fathers," 
by another Walter Scott, Scott of Satchel], "an old 
souldier,"as he described himself, " and no scholler, and 
one that can write names, but just the letters of his 
name." The delicate boy's imagination had been fed 
on Border traditions, and one of the first-fruits of his 
delight with Percy was a resolution to collect such 
ballads as were to be found in circulation among the 
peasantry of his own country. How far the Latin dunce 
was from being a dunce at work within the range of his 
own interests may be judged from the fact that at the 
age of fifteen he wrote a poem, which he modestly com- 
mitted to the flames, on the Conquest of Granada. 

After leaving the High School Scott attended some 
classes at the University, but what they were is of no 
consequence. He went on educating himself widely 
and energetically in his own way and on his own lines, 
without any conscious purpose. In 1786, when he was 
fifteen years old, — he was just one year younger than 
Wordsworth, — he abandoned a fancy for the military 
profession, and was entered as an apprentice in his 
father's office. This circumstance was important in his 
education for two reasons. It trained him to business 
habits, for which he was remarkable throughout the 
whole of his busy life. He never neglected his own 



240 SCOTT 

profession, though an early appointment to moderately 
lucrative posts withdrew him from practice at the bar ; 
and he carried habits of regularity, method, and punctu- 
ality into his literary work. His immense power of 
memory, which enabled him to perform such wonders of 
rapid production in middle age, was greatly helped by 
systematic ways of storing his promiscuous^ acquired 
antiquarian and historical lore — his arrangement of 
books, note-books, and references being always a model 
of precision. His employment in his father's office was 
of important service to him in another way. The col- 
lection of rents and other legal business took him into 
various parts of the country, and gave him opportunities 
not only of collecting ballads, which he did deliberately 
and of set purpose, but of observing and studying, which 
he did unconsciously, the oddities, humors, and serious 
sentiments of that society of which, in his novels, he 
afterward drew so broad and truthful a picture. 

Another cardinal circumstance in his education 
requires to be mentioned. It was a small circumstance 
in itself, but it had considerable consequences. A lect- 
ure on German Literature, delivered to the Edinburgh 
Philosophical Society by Henry Mackenzie, the " Man 
of Feeling," in 1788, seems to have roused a great enthu- 
siasm for the study of German among the young men of 
Edinburgh. Scott, then a youth of seventeen, joined 
with some others in forming a class. According to his 
own account, he was told by their teacher that he would 
never learn the language, because he Avould not take 
pains to lay a stable foundation by means of grammati- 
cal exercises ; but he learned enough to be able to get 
at the meaning, and his first publications were transla- 
tions from Burger and Goethe in 1796 and 1799, a few 
romantic ballads, and a chivalry play. " How far," 
Cartyle says, " ' Goetz von Bei lichingen ' actually affected 
Scott's literary destination, and whether without it the 
rhymed romances, and then the prose romances of the 



INFLUENCE OF GERMAN LITERATURE 241 

Author of ' Waverley,' would not have followed as they 
did, must remain a very obscure question — obscure and 
not important." Carlyle probably rather suggests the 
German influence on Scott when he speaks of Goetz as 
the parent of an innumerable progeny of " chivalry 
plays, feudal delineations, and poetico-antiquarian per- 
formances." What it probably did for him was to 
encourage him to persevere in the road along which he 
was already travelling. Before coming in contact with 
the modern ballads and feudal tales of Germany he had 
exhausted every thing of the kind to be found in our 
own literature, and had even mastered old French and 
Italian for the same purpose, reading through various 
collections of mediaeval romances, besides Dante, Boiando, 
and Pulci, and " fastening like a tiger upon every collec- 
tion of old songs which chance threw in his way." Ger- 
man literature attracted him as the first attempt in 
modern Europe to found a new literature on the old — 
a literature inspired b}' - an antiquarian spirit, a loving 
regard for old times, and antagonistic both in its mysti- 
cal longings and in its literary forms to the clear, precise 
vision and careful, elaborate style of the school of Racine 
and Pope. Scott himself is reported to have said of 
Taylor's translation of " Leonore " : " This was what 
made me a poet." He had heard Dugald Stewart recite 
the lines : 

" Tramp, tramp, across the land we go ; 
Splash, splash ! across the sea." 

"I had several times," he said, "attempted the more 
regular kind of poetry without success ; but here was 
something that I thought I could do." This was when 
he was a boy, and as soon as he knew German one of 
his first tasks was a translation of this ballad under the 
title of " William and Helen." Now, although Scott 
made the remark about the influence of Taylor's trans- 
lation to a friend of Taylor's, — and he was a man who 
16 



242 SCOTT 

liked to say complimentary things at bis own expense, — 
it is possible that the fresh German literature gave him 
the first revelation of the natural bent of his powers. 
But the impulse he received from German literature 
would probably have died out if it had not been re-en- 
forced from other quarters. As Carlyle says, a question 
of the kind is necessarily obscure, and not important; 
only Scott's contact with German literature deserves to 
be mentioned as an incident in the story of his literary 
development. 

At the time when he published his translations from 
the German, although he had reached his twenty-eighth 
year, nobody seems to have had a suspicion of the genius 
that was latent in him, or of the direction that it would 
take. To the outside world he appeared simply as a 
young lawyer likely to prosper in his profession, univer- 
sally popular as a humorous boon companion, always in 
high spirits, rather affecting idleness, yet never behind- 
hand with his work, with a certain reputation as a man 
of wide reading, taking an interest in literature and 
antiquities, but not suspected of any serious literary 
ambition. A casual stranger meeting Scott at this time, 
and hearing of him from his companions, would never 
have dreamed of regarding him as likely to become a 
more popular poet than Wordsworth, or Coleridge, or 
Campbell, or Moore. None of these } r oung men thought 
of disguising their literary aspirations ; they stood from 
the first in all men's eyes upon their character as poets. 
Yet somehow, with all his real or assumed indifference, 
Scott even then seems to have received rather more 
.than the respect paid to the mere dilettante. When 
Campbell was negotiating the publication of his "Pleas- 
ures of Hope," he was somehow attracted to Scott, and 
in a letter that has been preserved showed himself 
eminently pleased with the attention that Scott paid to 
him. It is the custom to speak of Scott as having 
stumbled, by accident, as it were, into literary fame ; 



scott's great industry 243 

but there are not wanting evidences that, although he 
did not allow literary ambition to absorb his energies, 
and kept this, like all other aspirations, under the con- 
trol of a healthy practical will, he was not quite so indif- 
ferent as he appeared. He was not a man who wore his 
heart upon his sleeve, and he liked to turn aside jestingly 
any inquisition into his own serious feelings. In his 
farewell to the Harp of the North these lines occur : 

" Much have I owed thy strains on life's long way, 
Through secret woes the world has never known, 
When on the weary night dawned wearier day, 
And bitterer was the grief devour'd alone. 

That I o'erlived such woes, Enchantress ! is thine own." 

After they were published, when the conversation be- 
tween him and a friend turned upon them, he dis- 
missed the subject with a comical look and smile, 
remarking : " Yes, as Master Stephen says, they are very 
melancholy and gentlemanlike." In like manner, he 
made light of his literary studies, and affected the air 
of a trifling outsider, while in his large and genial 
being he found room for an amount of literary labor, 
and steady preparation for labor, as great as was prac- 
tised by any professional man of letters in his time. 
" Every step that I have gained in the world," he once 
said, " has been hard won "; and it is a mistake to look 
upon Scott as a careless, good-humored genius, who 
stepped into the lists and carried off the prize for which 
so many other men had been laboriously contending. 

From a very early age the ambition to " found a 
poetical character," as he himself expressed it, had been 
a powerful motive in his life, though not overpowering 
and all-absorbing ; and he had been steadily accumulat- 
ing the materials of which he made such rapid use when, 
at last, the accident he had been waiting for pointed 
a finger in the right direction. He possessed his soul in 
patience, and, without hasting or resting, with tranquil 



244 SCOTT 

industry accumulated till the opportunity declared itself. 
Even when he was in the thick of his novel-writing, and 
producing more work than any other man of letters in 
his time, — two or three novels a year, — he was apparently 
so much occupied with professional, and social, and 
other literary engagements that James Ballantj'ne, who 
was in the secret, could afford to treat as absurd the 
idea that he could be the mysterious author of the 
Waverley novels. How could a man who had to be in 
his place every day during business hours as Clerk to the 
Court of Session, who was to be met at parties in the 
evening when he lived in town, who had his house full 
of visitors when he lived in the country, who did so 
much miscellaneous literary work in his own name — how 
could such a man possibly find time to write novels that 
were one of the wonders of the world. The reserve that 
he maintained about his novels with such plausibility, 
he maintained equally well in his earlier da}'s when he 
was gathering the materials that he afterward wove 
into shape. " Waverley," the first of the long series of 
his novels, was not published till 1814, but he did not 
then for the first time conceive the idea of realizing the 
daily life of people in the old times. A dozen years 
before that some remarks that he made in a talk with 
Mr. Gillies, whose " Recollections of Sir Walter Scott " 
is one of the most instructive books that have been 
written about the great man, show that his imagination 
was then busy picturing the details of ancient life. 
They were looking at the ruins of Roslin Castle, and 
speaking of the traditions of the place, when Scott said : 
" I wish we knew more than we are ever likely to do of 
the powerful family that once owned this castle and 
chapel. Doubtless there were beautiful damsels as well 
as belted knights that now 7 ' sleep the sleep that knows 
no waking' under these cold stones. Anxious, of course, 
were the days and hours which they spent within their 
castle walls : intricate and hazardous the adventures in 



CARLYLE ON RAPID WRITING 245 

which they were engaged. A chronicle of Roslin or of 
any other old castle of consideration, — that is to say, a 
minute record of the lives of its various inhabitants, how 
they fought and caroused, loved and hated, worked and 
played, — would be worth more than all the mere 
romances that ever were penned, as a fund of amusement 
and instruction. But we have only vague outlines ; im- 
agination must do the rest." And he went on to say : 
" On the whole, how little more do we learn from history 
than that Sir William lived and ruled at one time, and 
Sir John at another, while of the fair dames little oi\ 
nothing is said ! We find their names in long lists, it 
is true, and as having assisted in certain public occasions 
of war or pageantry. But the poet must either discover 
or invent more than this. He requires to know their 
individual habits of life, their wants, wishes, and springs 
of action. In truth, we know far more about Major 
Weir and his enchanted staff than about any of the 
Roslin barons and baronesses ; and if I were ever to 
become a writer of prose romances, I think I would 
choose him, if not for my hero, at least for an agent and 
leading one in my production." 

Carlyle overlooked such evidences of the zeal with 
which Scott in his younger days kept his imagination 
busy in reconstructing past life, and the thoroughness 
with which he ransacked history for facts to guide his 
imagination, when he sneered in his own contemptuous 
way at Scott's power of extempore writing, of produc- 
ing " impromptu novels to buy farms with." " A word 
here," Carlyle says, " as to the extempore style of writing, 
which is getting much celebrated in these days. Scott 
seems to have been a high proficient in it. His rapidity 
was extreme ; and the matter produced was excellent, 
considering that : the circumstances under which some 
of his novels, when he could not himself write, were 
dictated, are justly considered wonderful." But he 
goes on to say, " in the way of writing, no great thing 



246 SCOTT 

was ever, or will ever be done with ease, but with diffi- 
culty. Let ready writers with any faculty in them lay 
this to heart. Is it with ease, or not with ease, that a 
man shall do his best, in any shape ; above all, in this 
shape justly named of ' soul's travail,' working in the 
deep places of thought, embodying the True out of the 
Obscure and Possible, environed on all sides with the 
uncreated False? Not so, now or at any time. The 
experience of all men belies it; the nature of things 
contradicts it. Virgil and Tacitus, were they ready 
writers? The whole Prophecies of Isaiah are not 
equal in extent to 'this cobweb of a Jlevieio article. 
Shakespeare, we may fancy, wrote with rapidit} r , but not 
till he had thought with intensity; long and sore had 
this man thought, as the seeing eye may discern well, 
and had dwelt and wrestled amid dark pains and 
throes — though his great soul is silent about all that. 
It was for him to write rapidly at fit intervals, being 
ready to do it. And herein truly lies the secret of the 
matter : such surprises of mere writing, after due energy 
of preparation, is doubtless the right method ; the hot 
furnace having long worked and simmered, let the pure 
gold flow out at one gush. It was Shakespeare's plan ; 
no easy writer he, or he had never been a Shakespeare. 
Neither was Milton one of the mob of gentlemen that 
write Math ease." 

Sound doctrine this, no doubt, and particularly 
worthy to be kept in remembrance by an audience like 
this, who will exercise a paramount daily and hourly 
influence on a new generation, and who ma} r be tempted 
to encourage boys and young men in the silly conceit 
that they can do great things without labor and by 
sheer force of innate capacity. But sound as Carlyle 
is about the necessity of work, he is most unjust in his 
application of the doctrine to the case of Scott, llis 
savage attack on Scott's impromptu manner of writing 
is an example of his strange inability, with all his pierc- 



carlyle's essay ON SCOTT 247 

ing insight, to look fairly at the character of successful 
contemporaries. Carlyle's admirers are wont now to 
pass over all criticisms of his weak points with the 
remark that it is the fashion now to run him down, but 
as I published twelve years ago the same opinion of 
him that I hold still, I may claim to speak without 
prejudice from recent revelations. His essay on Scott, 
though like all his other writings the work of a man of 
great critical genius, is throughout, whenever he refers 
to the main subject of it, prejudiced and unfair. Scott's 
novels were not impromptu, though written with unpar- 
alleled rapidity ; in his case there had been great, 
furious energy of preparation, though he was as studi- 
ously secretive about the preparation as he was about 
the execution. He wrote rapidly because he wrote out 
of a fully stored mind. To read Carlyle's essay one 
would suppose that Scott turned to prose romance with 
careless facility when he found that his metrical 
romances no longer sold, no longer commanded the ear 
of the public, Byron having supplanted him in popular 
favor. This, indeed, is a very common impression, 
encouraged by a sort of vulgar wonder at Scott's ver- 
satility, that he easily turned his energies to prose when 
he found that verse would no longer pay. But, to use 
Carlyle's phrase, " the seeing eye may discern well," if 
the seeing eye takes the facts of Scott's earlier life 
within the range of its vision ; that, though he did not 
begin to write romances in prose till he was past forty, 
a large part of his previous life, so wide-ranging in its 
energies, had been a most studious and even systematic 
preparation. The conversation which I have quoted to 
you, showing a bent toward prose romance as an outlet 
for the creations of his imagination, took place some 
years before he had written any of his metrical romances, 
and while he was still only known among his personal 
acquaintances as a moderately prosperous lawyer and 
extremely pleasant companion. In fact, viewing his 



248 SCOTT 

life as a whole, we should say that his metrical romances 
were hut a passing diversion from the main direction of 
his imaginative energies. And now to explain briefly 
how these metrical romances came to be written. 

The " Lay of the Last Minstrel " was the first of 
them. He was engaged in preparing for the press Ins 
collection of Border Minstrelsy, the fruits of his search 
for Border ballads, when the subject and the form 
occurred to him. He was possessed at the time, as he 
tells us, with the ambition of "founding a poetical 
character," but both subject and form were suggested 
by accident. The subject grew in a remote way out of 
his soldiering. As Quartermaster of the Mid-Lothian 
Yeomanry, Scott made the acquaintance of the Duke of 
Buccleuch, the great head of the clan Scott. Feudal 
loyalty, such as a vassal was expected in mediaeval times 
to feel for his lord, was a real sentiment with the poet 
from his boyhood, and he would have considered it a 
duty to look upon the Duke as his feudal superior with 
respect and reverence. The duty was rendered a pleas- 
ure by the character of the man, whicli was frank, 
hearty, and generous. Something as near an intimacy 
as possible in the circumstances sprang up between the 
poet and the Buccleuch family.. The young Countess 
of Dalkeith, in particular, interested herself in his 
amusement and business of ballad-collecting, and in a 
few original ballads which he had composed himself for 
his forthcoming volume and for other collections. One 
day this lady suggested to Scott what she considered 
an excellent subject for a ballad. It was a legend which 
she had heard of as being current among the Border 
peasantry concerning, one Gilpin Horner — a strange, 
tricksy hobgoblin, which used to turn up unexpectedly 
in the haunts of men in the shape of an ugly little 
dwarf, and when excited was in the habit of muttering : 
"Tint! Tint! Tint." One sometimes hears the ques- 
tion asked why the goblin page in the " Lay of the Last 



ORIGIN OF THE " LAY OP THE LAST MINSTREL " 249 

Minstrel " cries : " Lost ! Lost ! Lost ! " What or who 
was lost ? The goblin himself it is that is lost, having 
strayed, as it were, from his supernatural master into 
human society ; wandering off in a truant, frolicsome 
mood, and being unable to find his way back. It is a 
prett} r fancy, and Scott was delighted with it as a sub- 
ject, as well as with the compliment of a suggestion 
from such a quarter. This was exactly what it ought 
to be, so like the good old times, when the gratified 
bard received a theme from his feudal lady. He bowed 
at once to the high command, and set to work to com- 
pose a ballad which might find a place in his jjroposed 
Border Minstrelsy. It was natural that he should think 
of connecting the goblin somehow with the house of 
Scott, considering who had given him the subject ; and 
it was natural also that, thinking of this noble house in 
connection with such a subject, his thoughts should turn 
to a renowned lady of Buccleuch in the sixteenth cen- 
tury — Dame Janet Bethune, a woman of a learned 
family, with a reputation for her knowledge of magic, 
as well as for the vigor with which she had managed 
the affairs of her house during a long widowhood. 
In Scott's active imagination the subject quickly 
took such dimensions that he began to feel that 
here at last he had lighted on a theme for a work of 
greater pretensions than a ballad — a theme out of 
which migiit be developed a picture of Border manners 
such as he had long been ambitious of executing. His 
ambition for some time had soared higher than the bal- 
lad ; he had become convinced that a poetical character, 
such as he wished to establish, could not be founded on 
so narrow a basis. Once inspired with the thought that 
his opportunit}' had come at last, he quickly elaborated a 
simple plot on which to weave his picture of life on the 
Borders in the sixteenth century, of alert strongholds, 
fighting clans, gallant chieftains, sturdy and fearless 
retainers — elevating it into the regions of romance with 



250 SCOTT 

a deal of love and superstition. It is difficult for us to 
realize what an influence Scott had in changing the cur- 
rent conception of the Borderers. They had long been 
looked upon as simply cattle-stealers, and yet Scott, by 
the force of his genius, convinced people that his way 
of looking on them was the right way. 

From the time of Jeffrey till the "Life of Scott" in 
the English Men of Letters Series it has been the 
custom to say that the plot machinery in the " Lay of 
the Last Minstrel " is defective, and that the goblin is a 
mere excrescence. It is argued that Scott failed to con- 
nect the superstitious machinery with the general course 
of the story, and that every thing done by the goblin's 
action might have been accomplished by natural means. 
Tli at was the common criticism in Scott's time, and 
when it was mentioned to him, he characteristically made 
a jest of it. lie said he had meant him for a great per- 
sonage, but he had slunk down to the kitchen. This 
criticism was made under the false idea that Scott com- 
posed carelessly and in haste. The truth is that the 
goblin at every turn of the story has an influence on the 
action. Of course it is true enough that different means 
might have been adopted, but then the effect would 
have been different. 

Jeffrey said that the young laird might have wan- 
dered into the wood by himself, but the effect produced 
on us by the goblin enticing him out in a wicked frolic 
and eluding the sentinels by an assumed disguise is very 
different. The plot is more complex than this, and, 
indeed, is more compactly framed than is generally 
stated in formal criticisms of the work. The story 
opens with a feast in Branksome Hall, where the knights 
are in readiness to depart. While they are making 
merry, the Lady retires to her bower, and overhears the 
spirits of the mountain and of the flood conversing 
about her daughter's fate. She hears them say that 
Branksome will never prosper till the Lady's pride be 



THE GOBLIN'S PART IN THE PLOT 251 

quelled and her daughter allowed to marry Lord Cran- 
stoun, with whose family they are at feud. The Lady 
determines to defy fate, and sends William of Deloraine 
to Melrose Abbey for a mystical book that has long 
been buried in the tomb of " the wondrous Michael 
Scott." On returning with his treasure William is 
attacked and wounded by Cranstoun and left to the care 
of the Earl's goblin page. The goblin sees the mystic 
book and sits down to unclasp it, but has scarcely done 
so when thunder is heard and a flash of lightning comes 
between him and the book — not, however, till the sprite 
has mastered certain magic spells. 

By means of his newly acquired knowledge the 
goblin conveys Deloraine into the castle and decoys the 
young heir into the woods, where the boy is caught by 
the English. Deloraine had committed some outrage 
on the. English Border, and Percy had entered Scotland 
to demand his surrender. The Lady will not give him 
up, but says that he will appear himself to fight the 
man who has brought the charge against him. But how- 
can William do this, since he is seriously wounded ? 
Here comes the important action of the goblin. He 
uses the spell to bring Cranstoun into Branksome, and 
Cranstoun, dressed in Deloraine's armor, proves victori- 
ous. The Lady then admits that fate is too strong for 
her, and allows him to marry her daughter. Thus the 
action of the goblin page is a very essential one, and 
Scott had a deeper meaning in the story than appears 
on the surface. He further imitated mediaeval stories 
in making the " Lay " a sort of allegory, in which the 
struggle ^between supernatural and human powers por- 
trays the struggle between human will and fate. The 
means that the Lady takes to prevent what is destined 
from coming to pass become in the end the very means 
by which it happens. 

As to the metre of the story, it is interesting to know 
that Scott received an important hint from Coleridge's 



252 SCOTT 

" Christabel." We find the influence of Coleridge 
appearing everywhere in the early part of the nine- 
teenth century, despite the fact that be wrote so little. 
"Christabel" was composed in 1797, although it was 
not published till 1816, and it so happened that a friend 
at Malta to whom he recited the poem had such a 
remarkable memory that he was able afterward to recite 
it in turn to Scott. It was thus that Scott got the hint 
of a peculiar variety of the metre he used. 



CHAPTER XVII 

BYRON 

SUMMARY OF LIFE — POPULAR IDENTIFICATION OF THE POET WITH 
HIS CREATIONS — " ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS" 

The year of the publication of " Childe Harold," — the 
work that brought Byron's extraordinary personality 
before the world, — was 1812. The day even is worth 
remembering, because it had probably been chosen 
with a superstitious preference and a fancy for singu- 
larity in the smallest things characteristic of the man. 
It was the 29th of February, a date in the calendar that 
comes only once in four years. 

Like Scott, Byron leaped at once into fame. While 
Wordsworth and Coleridge and Southey and Campbell 
and Moore were known only to small circles and isolated 
admirers, the fame of Scott and Byron was European. 
" The Lay of the Last Minstrel " was sold and read 
more widely than any poem ever had been before. It 
was followed by " Marmion " and "The Lady of the 
Lake," and the applause grew louder and more general 
with each publication. " The Vision of Don Roderick," 
a slighter poem and in a different stanza, was received 
somewhat more coldty; but when " Childe Harold" was 
published, Scott was engaged on another metrical 
romance, " Rokeb^-," for which he received a larger 
price than had ever before been paid for a poem — a 
sign that, in the opinion of publishers at least, his popu- 
larity was still on the increase. Then Byron's turn 
came. "Childe Harold" was received with an intense 
excitement beside which the rage for Scott's poetry 
appeared insignificant. Scott to this extent had pre- 
pared the way for Byron, that he had given an interest 

253 



254 BYRON 

in poetry to thousands of readers to whom verse in any 
shape had been a tiling to be avoided as dull and unin- 
telligible. But no poet before Byron had commanded 
so wide an audience; the world had never seen so 
general a curiosity about a poet's next work. 

Writers about Byron, from Moore to Mrs. Oliphant, 
have puzzled themselves to account for the instantane- 
ousness with which "Childe Harold" took hold of the 
public mind, and have generally found the solution in 
the fascinating strangeness and romantic interest of the 
writer's character. This was part of the secret, no 
doubt a large part ; but it was not all. If each gener- 
ation were not so busy with the moods of the moment as 
to be incapable without an effort of realizing how people 
felt in the peculiar situations of past history, the fit- 
ness of Byron's first great work to the time in which it 
was produced could hardly have escaped observation. 
When we turn to " Childe Harold " now, our interest is 
all in the poet, and we skip with comparative indiffer- 
ence the stanza after stanza of description and reflection 
to fasten on the autobiographical portions. But in the 
stanzas that we now skip the readers of the writer of 
1812 found powerful expression given to thoughts that 
were agitating their own minds, concerning scenes and 
events that had for them an intensity of interest such 
as men rarely feel except about their own personal con- 
cerns. Bear in mind the position of England and the 
state of Europe at the time, read the first two cantos of 
" Childe Harold " in that connection, and you will find in 
stanza after stanza abundant evidence of one cause for 
the excitement with which the poem was received. 
Napoleon was then at the zenith of his career, master of 
Germany and Austria and Italy, and half master of 
Spain. It seemed as if he was on the point of achieving 
his ambition of making the conquest of Europe. He 
was engaged in preparing for that huge expedition into 
Russia which proved his ruin, but there was no symptom 



EXCITEMENT THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY 255 

of ruin then. His arms had hardly received a check, 
except from English troops in the Peninsula. Great 
Britain seemed the only power capable of checking his 
course, and there was an intensity of excitement 
throughout our country such as had never been experi- 
enced before and has never been since. We were fight- 
ing for our national existence, fighting as the champions 
and leaders of all the kingdoms of Christendom, pour- 
ing subsidies into the hands of our Continental allies, 
raising armies by conscription. All eyes were turned 
at the moment upon Spain, where our troops under 
Wellington, after some doubtful victories, stood at bay 
within the lines of Torres Vedras, facing four French 
armies that were quartered in the Peninsula. 

In the midst of this excitement what were our poets 
doing to put themselves in sympathy with the national 
mood ? Every one of them was quietly pursuing his 
own predetermined line of literary activity, inspired by 
no message to the troubled spirit of the age of force 
and distinction enough to command attention. Words- 
worth had, indeed, issued from his Westmoreland retreat 
a commonplace prose tract on the Convention of Cintra, 
and some noble sonnets dedicated to Liberty and Inde- 
pendence. Some of these sonnets are among his master- 
pieces in point of literary form and loftiness of senti- 
ment ; but they have not the fire and directness of 
popular verse. Coleridge, his brief fit of poetic activity 
over, was lecturing on Shakespeare, and expounding 
political philosophy in a periodical called the Friend. 
Southey was writing review articles for the Quarterly, 
and meditating a poem on the last of the Goths, in 
execution of his scheme of poems based on national 
mythologies. Moore was busy with a new number of 
his Irish Melodies, and speculating on the chances of a 
change of Government. Campbell, who had electrified 
the country twelve years earlier with his national songs, 
had revived the Spenserian stanza in " Gertrude of 



256 BYKON 

Wyoming," and was working bard at task-work for 
the publishers. Scott had shown more inclination 
to follow the direction of popular interest. ■ He had 
appealed to the spirits of the Mountains and the Tor- 
rents, who had inspired his minstrelsy before, to vouch- 
safe him -inspiration for a loftier theme, the liberation 
of the Spaniards by Wellington ; and in "The Vision 
of Don Roderick " had celebrated the triumphs of our 
soldiers in the Peninsula with stirring martial ardor. 
There was much spirit in the strain, and three of the 
stanzas describing the soldiers of England, Scotland, 
and Ireland have become classical, and are still dear to 
every school-boy. As a prophet of the warlike spirit of 
the time Scott was unmatched and unmatchable, but he 
harped only on one string, and high and stubborn as 
was the resolution of the country at the moment, fixed 
as it was in its determination to fight, the national mind 
was crossed by other moods in the pauses of the con- 
flict, moods to which the equally tempered Scott was 
incapable of giving expression. And these moods, nat- 
ural in a time of great excitement and sustained sus- 
pense, found an exponent of titanic force in the young 
poet who made his voice heard in the pilgrimage of 
" Childe Harold." Can it be matter for astonishment 
that all ears were inclined to hear ? 

The strain in which the new poet addressed the public 
was not the most obviously opportune one of drum and 
trumpet exhortation. It was full of irregular, almost 
capricious changes, varying through many moods, from 
tierce delight in battle and fiery enthusiam for freedom 
to cynical mockery of ambition and despondent medita- 
tion on the fleeting character of human happiness and 
national greatness. It was the work of a distempered 
mind, and it spoke out with passionate sincerity what 
was in that mind ; and so doing, as the age itself was 
moody and distempered with prolonged and feverish 
excitement, it was a revelation to thousands of readers 



" CHILDE HAROLD " 257 

of their own inmost thoughts. Macaulay in a well-known 
passage describes Byron as having interpreted Words- 
worth to the multitude. Looking at this — his first pro- 
duction — purely from the literary point of view, there 
is much truth in this, for the pilgrimage of "Childe 
Harold " was undoubtedly the spontaneous overflow of 
powerful feeling ; the poem was evolved by the poet's 
imagination out of genuine personal emotion ; the satis- 
faction of this emotion was the motive that set the 
imagination at work. Byron's poetry came from the 
heart. In this respect, and also in the matter of poetic 
diction, he may truly be said to have interpreted Words- 
worth's theories to the multitude. But he did more 
than this : he interpreted the multitude to themselves ; 
he showed them as in a glass what they had been on 
the point of thinking. 

The first stage of Childe Harold's pilgrimage la} r 
through Spain, on which at that moment the trembling- 
hopes of Europe were fixed as the theatre where 
Napoleon's fate was to be determined — where the last 
stake was being played for or against him. The poet 
described the scenery where this thrilling drama was 
in progress, and commented on the actors and the 
incidents. We must remember this to understand the 
full force for his contemporaries of such lines as : 

" By Heaven! it is a splendid sight to see 
(For one who hath no friend, no brother there) 
Their rival scarfs of niix'd embroidery, 
Their various arms that glitter in the air." 

Or : 

" And must they fall — the young, the proud, the brave — 
To swell one bloated chief's unwholesome reign ? 
No step between submission and a grave? 
The rise of rapine and the fall of Spain ? " 

Or: 

" No more beneath soft Eve's consenting star 
Fandango twirls his jocund castanet : 

17 



Ah monarchs ! could ye taste the mirth ye mar, 
Not in the toils of glory would ye fret ; 
The hoarse dull drum would sleep, arid man be happy yet! " 

Or the stanza with which he takes farewell of Spain : 

" Nor .yet, alas ! the dreadful work is done ; 
Fresh legions pour adown the Pyrenees : 
It deepens still, the work is scarce begun, 
Nor mortal eye the distant end foresees. 
Fall'n nations gaze on Spain : if freed, she frees 
More thai: lier fell Pizarros once enchained." 

In the second canto Byron conducted his pilgrim to 
Greece, to scenes of departed greatness, and his medi- 
tations there also struck a sympathetic chord in the 
hearts of a people who saw historic grandeurs trembling 
all round them, and knew not when the turn of their 
own empire would come. The half-hearted mirth with 
which the pilgrim, with his assumption of joyless C} r ni- 
cism and discontent produced by satiety, relieved the 
monotony of his gloomy meditations, his sudden changes 
of mood from ardent aspiration to bitter mockery, from 
impassioned delight in nature's beauties to scorn of 
men's deformities, were all in unison with the hj'sterical, 
distracted state of the public temper. We must live 
over again the anxieties of those troubled 3 r ears when 
the strain of resistance to Napoleon's ambition, sustained 
year after year, Avas becoming intolerable, and the 
sternest resolution was dashed at times by fears that the 
dreams of the man of destiny would be fulfilled — we 
must do this to understand the instantaneous effect of 
" Childe Harold." The poet spoke the words that were 
on every-body's lips, spoke them with all the fire and 
intensity of genius. Intense susceptibility to the impres- 
sions of the moment was always a striking feature of 
Byron's character, and he " drew from his audience in a 
vapor," to use once more Mr. Gladstone's famous simile, 
'• what lie gave back to them in a flood." He profes^-ed 



PUBLIC INTERPRETATION OF THE POEM 259 

indifference in the opening of bis poem ; spoke with a 
languid air of his reluctance to awake the weary Nine 
for so lowly a lay as his ; but the fire of most of the 
subsequent stanzas gave the lie to this affectation. 

This close harmony with the moods of the time is 
greatly left out of sight in attempts to explain the 
rapidit3 r with which Byron gained the ear of his audi- 
ence. Too much stress is laid in these explanations on 
the romantic character of the hero, driven into his 
pilgrimage by a strange unrest, satiated with pleasure, 
rendered joyless by the excess of it, prematurely pene- 
trated by the conviction that all is vanity ; a wanderer, 
not because he hopes for relief from change, but because 
change is an imperative necessity to him. It was not 
the character of " Childe Harold " that first drew atten- 
tion to the poem ; it was the interest in the poem that 
drew attention to the character of the poet, with whom 
the public, in spite of his protests, persisted in identify- 
ing him. We must not credit the readers of the first 
two cantos of "Childe Harold " with knowing all that 
we can now learn about Byron, from works of which 
this first effort, with all its revelation of power, was 
comparatively but a feeble and one-sided instalment. 
Their interest was principally in the poem itself, which 
enthralled them before they knew much or any thing 
about the author ; and if we try to look at it with their 
eyes, following its movement with the interest they 
naturally had in its incidents, we find abundant reason 
for their admiration in the impetuous vehemence with 
which the poet hurries from theme to theme, fixing one 
impression after another with a few powerful strokes, 
moving with the ease of a giant in the fetters of a diffi- 
cult stanza, controlling the rhymes with a master's 
hand into the service of his fervent feeling, instead of 
allowing them to direct and check and hamper its flow 
as is the way with rhymesters of less resource. The 
interest of the public once kindled in the poem, turned 



260 BYRON 

naturally to the poet, and they would have it that in his 
strange hero, a new character in poetry, he had drawn 
the picture of himself. Every striking publication sets 
the public speculating about the author, and there were 
several superficial circumstances that favored this belief. 
Byron had himself passed through the scenes through 
which he conducted his pilgrim. True, he said in the 
preface that the pilgrim was only " a fictitious character 
introduced for the sake of giving some connection to 
the piece" ; but the very disclaimer encouraged the 
public in the popular conviction. When they began 
enquiring about the author, they found that he was a 
young lord in his twenty-fifth year, who had for some 
time been his own master, and had led rather a dissolute 
life ; why, if he did not mean to picture himself, should 
he choose so discreditable a fictitious character as a 
prematurely jaded voluptuary, stalking in joyless revery 
through scenes in which all Europe at the time felt a 
living interest ? 

The mistake was natural, perhaps, and yet none the 
less it was a mistake. Childe Harold's moods were 
only the darker moods of an intemperately sensitive 
and variable spirit, in which heights of joyous mirth 
were quite as frequent as depths of sombre melanchoijr. 
When Byron began the poem, his intention was, as he 
says in his preface, following the words of Dr. Beattie, 
" to give full scope to his inclination, and be either 
droll or pathetic, descriptive or sentimental, tender or 
satirical, as the humor struck him." He had intended, 
in fact, what he afterward accomplished in "Don Juan." 
And in his first draughts of the poems he had called the 
hero Childe Burun, the ancient name of his famity. 
But as he went on and thought of making his pilgrim 
a fictitious character of certain stamp, a character, as he 
tells us, modelled on Dr. Moore's "Zeluco," he altered 
the cast of the poem to correspond, and replaced more 
than one mirthful passage by others of a melancholy 



THE POET'S UPBRINGING 261 

description. Thus only one side of his own character 
was represented in the poem, and the shades even of 
that were very much deepened. 

To make this clear let us run rapidly over his life be- 
fore the publication of " Childe Harold." We shall see 
that he had other reasons for despondency and discon- 
tent than the fulness of satiety. His life had been very 
different from that of most young members of the peer- 
age. He had succeeded to the title of Lord Byron at 
the age of ten by the death of an eccentric and violent 
grand-uncle, who had never recognized his existence or 
done any thing to help his mother in giving him an edu- 
cation suitable to his future rank. The Byrons were 
one of the oldest families in England, but for several 
generations before the birth of the poet the family 
estates had been reduced and the family name disgraced 
by turbulent, extravagant, and scandalous conduct. 
There were honorable traditions in the family, but they 
belonged to a date before its elevation to the peerage. 
Captain Byron, the poet's father, was a profligate 
younger son, who added gaming to his other vices. 
His first wife was the divorced wife of a peer, with 
whom he had eloped, and who died soon after their 
marriage. The Hon. Mrs. Leigh, Byron's half-sister, 
was the only offspring of this union. His second wife 
was Catherine Gordon, the heiress of Gight. He mar- 
ried her for her money, and in less than two years 
(1786-88) it was swallowed up in the pajmient of his 
debts. Gight was sold, and she was left with only 
enough to yield her the small pittance on which she 
educated her son. This son, the poet, was born in Lon- 
don on January 22, 1788. Mrs. Byron, though passion- 
ately attached to her spendthrift husband, was a woman 
of extremely violent temper ; and life with her hus- 
band proving impossible, she withdrew with her young 
son to Aberdeen in 1790, two years after his birth. 
The father contrived to extort from her narrow means 



262 BYRON 

a sum sufficient to take him to France, and died there in 
the following year. Mrs. Byron remained in Aberdeen, 
domiciled in one flat after another in Queen Street, Vir- 
ginia Street, and Broad Street, till the death of the 
fourth Lord Byron in 1798, in the poet's eleventh year, 
opened the way to his succession, and the family re- 
moved South. With such a mother, a woman of natu- 
rally ungovernable temper, exasperated by her being 
dragged down from affluence to poverty, sometimes 
fondling her child with extravagant affection, some- 
times storming at him as "a lame brat," and hurling 
things at him, — the fire-irons are said to have been her 
favorite weapons, — a proud, sensitive, passionate child 
was not likely to learn self-control. Among other 
things, she probably exaggerated that sensitiveness 
about his lameness to which biographers and critics at- 
tach so much importance. He seems to have had one 
or both feet clubbed, and one of the first uses that his 
mother made of her larger command of moiie}^ when 
he became Lord Byron, was to consult physicians and 
quacks about the cure of this defect, and on their ad- 
vice to apply painful remedies in vain. Her violent 
temper and capricious affection harmed him quite as 
much after his accession as before, for she kept inces- 
santly interfering with himself and his teachers, and 
quarrelled so outrageously with his guardian, Lord Car- 
lisle, and with every-body who came near her, that she 
was practically excluded from the society of people of 
her own rank. Thus it happened that when Byron 
came of age he had no friends except such as he had 
made for himself at Harrow and Cambridge. Brought 
up with very exalted ideas of his own rank, all the 
more vivid that he had not been born in it, he had no 
knowledge of the domestic life of families in that 
rank; he had no social acquaintance with them, and 
when he was of age to take his seat in the House of 
Lords, there was not a single member of that House 



HIS VARIABLE TEMPER 263 

whom he could ask as a personal friend to introduce 
him. There was some technical difficulty also about 
his taking his seat. At the last moment an impediment 
was discovered, which could not be removed till a docu- 
ment had been hunted up somewhere in Cornwall. When 
Bj-ron set out in 1809 on the travels which he has im- 
mortalized in "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," he had no 
pleasant home to take leave of, no pleasant relations to 
break off with the class to which he belonged. He had 
bitter memories where other men have sweet and sad ; 
and in his despondent moods it required no strong effort 
of imagination to picture himself as a joyless outcast, 
a scornful hater of his kind. Perhaps one reason for 
the readiness with which the public identified him with 
his gloomy hero was that they could not understand 
how a young lord could be unhappy from any other 
cause but a surfeit of the pleasures of life ; they did 
not know at what a distance from the lap of luxury the 
titled author had spent his early years; otherwise the 
evidences of unhappiness and distemper of mind in his 
poetry might have been more intelligible to them. 

The real Byron at this period, however, though he 
had his moods of passionate melancholy, was far from 
being habitually joyless and misanthropic, consumed by 
a mj^sterious sadness. He was prone to extremes, as 
might have been expected from the descendant of such 
ancestry. He came of turbulent kin on both sides. He 
was tempestuous in all his feelings, extreme in anger 
and extreme in affection, in melancholy and in mirth, but 
the pendulum swung as often to the one side as to the 
other. For every height there is a hollow. We hear 
of his fits of ungovernable temper in his childhood, of 
his silent, sullen rages, of his falling in love at the age 
of eight with such precocious intensity that years after- 
ward the mention of the marriage of the girl nearly 
choked him with jealous fury. But there is a brighter 
side to the picture, though that is not so often dwelt 



264 BYRON 

upon. Those who were set in authority over him, from 
his nurse, Mary Gray, to his tutor at Harrow, found him 
extremely sweet-tempered and affectionate when they 
treated him with kindness. He was by no means unruly 
when he was not crossed and thwarted and misunder- 
stood in his phrvful advances, though he was then 
resentful enough. Like all people of extravagant sensi- 
bilities, he was exacting in his claims for a return of 
affection, and quick to take offence when the response 
was not as ardent as he thought he had a right to 
expect from the warmth of his overtures. It is not a 
good constitution of mind for happiness in this world, 
where individuals are not always ready to reciprocate ; 
but it is as far removed as possible from the hard, sullen, 
misanthropic temperament that remains sealed up in its 
own moroseness, impervious to any touch of kindness. 
Byron is often described as a morbid egotist ; but his 
egotism, if such it is to be called, took the form of an 
intense longing for sympathy ; it was not, at least, a cold, 
self-contained egotism, or an egotism that demands more 
than it is willing to give, but an intemperate craving for 
an interchange of kindly offices, apt, only as such feel- 
ings are, to be chilled and embittered when it meets 
with an irresponsive or hostile object. When Ave read 
the record of his school and college friendships, of 
which there are numerous and eloquent memorials in his 
first published poems, and compare this with the moods 
of Childe Harold, who described his friends as : 

" The flatterers of the festal hour, 
The heartless parasites of present cheer," 

we can understand Byron's saying that he would not 
for all the world that his character were like his hero's. 
Some of his critics endeavor to give an unfavorable 
color even to his friendships, by representing that he 
chose his friends from a rank beneath his own — boys 
and youths who might flatter his vanity by their grati- 



" HOURS OF IDLENESS " 265 

tiule for his patronage. But all his school and college 
friends were not beneath him in rank. The critics for- 
get this, and forget also that, owing to Byron's early 
training, lie was likely to feel most at home with his 
poorer school-fellows, and that from the same cause he 
was more likely to feel sympathy with poverty and be 
disposed to relieve it. 

It was a necessary incident of Byron's high spirit and 
craving for love and friendship and admiration that he 
should be inordinately ambitious. If he had not been 
lame, he might, with his taste for an active life and the 
traditions of his family before him, have realized his 
boyish dream of raising and commanding a regiment. 
Failing this, his ambition seems at first to have been 
toward the distinction of an orator, and he was noted at 
school for his declamatory powers. He did not, in fact, 
abandon this ambition till " he awoke one morning and 
found himself famous" as a poet. Only two days 
before he had made his first speech in the House of 
Lords, and had achieved a decided success in that fas- 
tidious assemblage. But his school-days fell in the time 
when one great poet after another was rising into fame, 
and, always sensitive to the influence of circumstances, 
he began to try his hand at verses. The applause of 
friends induced him to appeal to a wider audience, and 
in his nineteenth year he issued with memorable results 
a small volume entitled " Hours of Idleness." The pref- 
ace to this is very characteristic. We can trace all 
through a curious struggle between modesty and pride, 
a disposition to be conciliatory and estimate his efforts 
modestly, crossed every now and then by a haughty 
consciousness of real power. There are several expres- 
sions peculiarly interesting in the light of his subsequent 
career. " I have hazarded my reputation and feelings 
in publishing this volume," he said. "I have passed 
the Rubicon, and must stand or fall by the cast of the 
die." This serious language, appropriate to an enter- 



266 BYRON 

prise in the issue of which the writer was deeply inter- 
ested, is hardly in keeping with his protestations further 
on of indifference, with his offer to submit without a 
murmur to the verdict of the critics, or with the state- 
ments that poetry is not his primary vocation, that he 
will be content with whatever credit he may get from 
this volume, and that "it is highly improbable, from his 
situation and pursuits hereafter, that he should obtrude 
himself a second time upon the public." Upon one 
point he was very explicit — that he wished no consider- 
ation at the hands of critics on the ground of his rank : 
he " would rather incur the bitterest censure of anony- 
mous criticism than triumph in honors granted merely 
to a title." There was, however, a somewhat ungener- 
ous comparison suggested between himself and bards 
who lived in elevated residences in the close air of towns, 
and made money by their writings ; and this, combined 
with many references to his rank and his youth and the 
seats of his ancestors in the poems themselves, was 
seized upon by the Edinburgh lievieio and made the theme 
of a very cutting article. " Whatever judgment," said 
the reviewer, who is generally supposed to have been 
Lord Brougham, " may be passed on the poems of this 
noble minor, it seems we must take them as we find them, 
and be content; for they are the last we shall ever 
have from him. He is at best, he says, but an intruder 
into the groves of Parnassus; he never lived in a garret, 
like thoroughbred poets ; and ' though he once roved a 
careless mountaineer in the Highlands of Scotland,' he 
has not of late enjoyed this advantage. Moreover, he 
expects no profit from his publication; and whether it 
succeeds or not ' it is highly improbable, from his situa- 
tion and pursuits hereafter,' that he should again conde- 
scend to become an author. Therefore, let us take what 
we get, and be thankful. What right have we poor 
devils to be nice ? We are well off to have got so 
much from a man of this lord's station ; who does not 



" ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS " 267 

live in a garret, but has the sway of Newstead Abbey. 
Again, we say, let us be thankful, and, with honest 
Sancho, bid God bless the giver, nor look the gift-horse 
in the mouth." 

Byron writhed under this ridicule, all the more gall- 
ing that it was accompanied by a contemptuous judg- 
ment that his poetry belonged to the class which neither 
gods nor men are said to approve, and that his effusions 
were spread over a dead flat, and could no more get 
above or below that level than if they were so much 
stagnant water. We need not pause to cons/der whether 
the criticism was just or unjust ; the poems are of 
interest now only as throwing light on his character ; 
and if they were mediocre, and neither particularly 
good nor particularly bad, the same fault could not be 
alleged against the productions to which this criticism 
led. The poet greatly misjudged himself when he 
promised submission without a murmur. He resolved 
instantly upon revenge. The common story ran that 
immediately on reading the review he drank two bottles 
of claret, conceived the plan of a bitter satire on " Eng- 
lish Bards and Scotch Reviewers," and sat down and 
wrote a hundred lines of it at a single sitting. It is pos- 
sible that he did this ; but it would seem from a passage 
in Moore's Life that long before the appearance of the 
article he had a satire of the kind tying by him, and that 
the attack only gave him a motive for remodelling and 
publishing it, and inspired some of the more bitter pas- 
sages. It was fourteen months after the article that 
the satii'e in reply made its appearance, and it created a 
great sensation — as well by its trenchant force as by 
the boldness and gallantry of the youth in tackling the 
Edinburgh Reviexo, then in the height of its formidable 
critical supremacy. It is possible that during the year 
and more that elapsed Byron's wrath might have 
evaporated, and that he might have come to the con- 
clusion, which he afterward expressed, that it was "a 



268 byro:^ 

miserable record of misplaced anger and indiscriminate 
acrimony," if the severity of the Edinburgh Review 
had been counterbalanced by any warmth of recognition 
and appreciation from other quarters. If any of the 
poets of the time had protested against the injustice of 
the review, if his volume had opened the doors of 
society to him as " Childe Harold" afterward did, if 
his relative and guardian, Lord Carlisle, had given any 
recognition of his ability or shown any sympathy with 
his aspirations, Byron, always prompt to respond to 
kindness and affection, would certainly not have retali- 
ated with indiscriminate acrimony, bringing within the 
sweep of his anger not merely the Scotch reviewers who 
had attacked him, but the English bards who had 
received his adventure with silent indifference. He 
would not have had the same motive for making them 
disagreeably aware of his existence and of his power. 
But as it was, no recognition came to counteract the 
effect of the hostile criticism, and he came to the reso- 
lution to pay off his score against the whole world of 
literature, and go abroad. The friendlessness of his 
position was, as I have said, brought still more painfully 
home to him by the circumstances attending his coming 
of age and his introduction to the House of Lords. 

The study of Byron's life before he began the pil- 
grimage of Childe Harold thus shows us that he was a 
very different man from the pilgrim, who is represented 
as a youth who had been rendered misanthropic and 
scornfully indifferent to every thing that poor human 
life could yield by an unbroken course of sycophantic 
flattery and unbridled self-indulgence. Though Byron 
took the incidents of the travels from his own experience 
and put his own reflections into the mouth of the pil- 
grim, he undoubtedly, as he himself said, took the con- 
ception of the character from Dr. John Moore's " Zeluco." 
All the same, the identification of the poet with his own 
creation laid firm hold of the public mind, and helped 



THE POET'S UNCONQUERABLE SHYNESS 269 

to strengthen the impression produced by the poem. 
The real Lord Byron, as we know him in Moore's Life, 
would have been a much less romantic and interesting 
character to tbe generality of readers. 

From the winter of 1812 till his death in the spring 
of 1824 Byron kept his position as the foremost poet, 
the greatest literary force, of his generation, every year 
bringing some new revelation of his amazing power and 
fertility. At first the poet's popularity threatened to 
be fatal to the development of his genius. Societ} 7 , 
which had received the productions of his nonage with 
indifference, and had applauded the spirit of his vindic- 
tive satire without exhibiting much curiosity about the 
author, opened its arms immediately to the powerful 
assault of the pilgrim. Congratulations and invitations 
were showered upon him from a fashionable world 
which had hitherto ignored the existence of the impover- 
ished lord of Newstead Abbey, too proud and shy to 
push any claim to their acquaintance. He went every- 
where as a lion, as the most interesting lion that had 
been on exhibition for many years, and he accepted this 
change in his circumstances with all the impressionable 
facility of his character. A certain contempt may have 
mingled with his pleasure in the sweet taste of social 
homage, a certain bitterness when he thought how he 
had been neglected before ; but he had too much of the 
milk of human kindness in him not to be delighted with 
his popularity. There was only one drawback to his 
pleasure, an unconquerable shyness. He was not at 
his ease in mixed society. He had never in his life been 
accustomed to it, and his sudden introduction as an 
object of universal attention was not calculated to put 
him at his ease. But this constraint and embarrassment, 
which would probably have worn off in time, did not 
prevent him from deriving much enjoyment from his 
new position, and in the company of his familiars he 
threw off his reserve and Grave free rein to his high 



270 BYEON 

spirits, while the public, deceived by an attitude due 
more to shyness than to pride, gave him credit for all the 
inward gloom and meditative jovlessness of the hero of 
the pilgrimage. The idolizing of Byron lasted for four 
years, and if it had lasted longer, his genius would prob- 
ably have been stifled before it readied its maturity. He 
produced his least important work in those four years, 
as a result of accommodating himself to the spirit of the 
society which lavished flattery and admiration on him. 
He belonged to the not uncommon class of men who 
cannot exert their full powers without the stimulus of 
adversity and opposition. There was a rage at the 
time for Oriental tales. It was in the year of Byron's 
entrance into fame and societ3^, as you may remember,. 
that Moore made his contract with the Longmans for a 
poem on an Oriental subject. Byron had been in the 
East, and had been besides an omnivorous reader of 
Eastern history, and he set himself to supply the same 
fashionable demand, producing in marvellously quick 
succession " The Giaour," " The Bride of Abydos," 
"The Corsair," " Lara," and "The Siege of Corinth." 
The tales were full of life and color, and their melo- 
dramatic heroes and incidents fairly eclipsed in popular 
favor Scott's mediaeval barons and nuns, Highland 
bandits and Lowland moss-troopers. But they belong 
to a much lower range of artistic creation than Byron's 
later work. Again the world paid him the equivocal 
compliment of identifying him with his gloomy, self- 
contained, man-defying heroes, even circulating the 
myth that he had himself been a remorseless pirate dur- 
ing his wanderings in the East ; and he was vain 
enough, mainly, I believe, to cover with romantic mystery 
a reserved manner really due to shyness, to encourage 
rather than discourage the belief. The Nemesis for this 
masquerading soon overtook him, but we cannot regret 
it much, seeing that if he had continued an admired 
member of fashionable society his work as a poet would 



LADY BYRON LEAVES THE POET 271 

never have reached the same depth and grandeur. 
" Society," as he afterward felt and said, " is fatal to all 
great original undertakings;" it is certainly fatal to 
undertakings in the spirit of Byron's subsequent works. 
We have a raeasiu-e of what satisfied the society of the 
Prince Regent's Court in Moore's " Lalla Rookh," and 
Byron's own metrical tales. 

It was in the consequences of an unfortunate marriage 
that Byron paid the penalty for the public conception 
of him as a monstrous Cliilde Harold or a Lara. I need 
not dwell upon the incidents of that brief union. He 
was married to Miss Milbanke on the 2d of January, 
1815. A daughter was born on the 10th of December. 
On the 13th of January next Lady Byron left home on 
a visit to her parents, and on the way wrote an affec- 
tionate letter to her husband, beginning "Dear Duck," 
and ending "Your Pippin." A few days after her 
father wrote to say that she could not return to him, 
and proceedings were at once commenced for a judicial 
separation. The reasons for this strange rupture must 
always remain a mj'Stery and a subject for dispute. 
" The causes," Byron once said, " were too simple easily 
to be found out." There certainly is not the slightest 
foundation for the abominable calumny published some 
eighteen years ago by Mrs. Beecher Stowe on Lady 
Byron's authority. As soon as that charge was made 
public indisputable proofs were forthcoming, in the shape 
of affectionate letters, that Lady Byron remained on 
intimate terms with Mrs. Leigh, and if she then enter- 
tained the suspicion which she afterward communicated 
,-to Mrs. Stowe, she deserves to go down to posterity as 
one of the worst specimens of her sex. At the time, 
with admirable self-control, she maintained impenetra- 
ble silence as to her reasons for deserting her husband, 
with the result that the British public, regarding Lord 
Byron as a Childe Harold or a Lara, imagined that the 
reasons must be too dreadful for publication, and made 



272 BYRON 

up for the lack of facts by the wildest creations of fancy. 
If the case is looked at calmly, a simple explanation is not 
difficult to find. A woman who could ask such a hus- 
band in a Voice of provoking sweetness " when he meant 
to give up his bad habit of making verses," a woman 
who never lost her temper, never gave up her point, and 
inflicted the most malignant stabs in the tenderest places 
with angelic coolness, possessed the power of goading a 
sensitive, impetuous man to frenzy. She had a maid, 
for example, to whom Byron entertained a violent aver- 
sion, because he suspected her of poisoning his wife's 
mind against him. Lady Byron listened to all his 
furious tirades with unruffled meekness, but never con- 
sented to send the woman away. She was quite as jeal- 
ous of her dignity, quite as resentful of slights, real or 
supposed, as himself ; and in their differences of opinion 
she had the inestimable advantage of a temper perfectly 
under control, and a command of all the sweet resigna- 
tion of a martyr, combined with the most skilful inge- 
nuity of provoking retort. Byron, with his liability to 
fits of uncontrollable passion, could never have been an 
easy man to live with ; but if his wife had been a loving, 
warm-hearted woman, with the unconscious tact that 
such women have, the result would probably have been 
very different. 

For a few weeks after Lady Byron left her husband 
society was content with house-to-house rumor and com- 
ment ; but presently the indiscretion of one of the poet's 
friends gave an opportunity for public remarks on the 
case, and Byron's character being prejudiced by the 
identification with the worst heroes of his poetiy, that 
howl of indignation was set up which is so graphically 
described by Macaulay. Byron, in a tender and remorse- 
ful fit, had written a farewell to his wife. There was 
no reason to doubt the sincerity of his feelings ; as we 
now know, the tears fell from his eyes on the paper as 
he wrote the lines. A friend to whom he showed this 



byron's farewell to his wife 273 

farewell, thinking that it might counteract the rumors 
that were in circulation against him, sent it to a news- 
paper. But the public regarded it as an attempt to 
prejudice them against the wife by representing her as 
harsh and unforgiving, while he on his side was willing 
to be reconciled; and when it was followed soon after 
by the scathing sketch of Mrs. Clermont, the maid whom 
he suspected of poisoning Lady Byron's mind against 
him, the outcry became loud and indignant, and the 
poet, burning under a sense of injustice, but roused at 
last to return scorn for scorn, went off once more on a 
pilgrimage from England, vowing never to return. 

Once more, after his four years of sunshine, in revolt 
against society, distempered, 

"Like sweet bells jangled, harsh and out of tune," 

Byron became the exponent of the restlessness, the dis- 
content, the passionate longings of a time that was, like 
himself, "out of joint." And the greatest of his works 
were written during the remaining eight years of his 
life, before he perished in the Greek war of independence, 
and the extent of these, quite apart from their quality, 
is a standing sufficient answer to the exaggerated re- 
ports that were circulated about him in the country 
from which he had withdrawn. I am glad to see that 
Mrs. Oliphant, in her recent work on the " English Lit- 
erature from 1790 to 1825," written with most admira- 
ble judgment, breadth of s} r mpathy, and easy mastery 
of her materials, does not incline to a very prevalent 
impression that Byron's reputation is on the wane. In 
purely literary circles no doubt it has been for a genera- 
tion or more, because it is the tendency now to judge 
poets mainly by their technical qualities, and it is not 
in minute finish or exactly interpretative felicity that 
Byron's strength lies. His feeling was too deep, his 
thought too impetuous, to admit of his being a great 
18 



274 BYRON 

verbal artist, like Tennyson or like Carlyle. We must 
take his achievement as a whole, if we wish to give him 
his due rank in literature. His singular sensitiveness to 
the impressions of his own immediate surroundings is 
against the permanence of his fame, because living as he 
did in a time of unrest and conflict, and reflecting these 
characters in his poetry, he is apt to appear hysterical, 
affected, and unreal to people who look at him out of a 
calmer atmosphere. On the other hand, the superficial 
inconsistencies of his character must always tempt 
critics who have a liking for difficult problems. He is 
like Hamlet in this respect, as I have elsewhere said be- 
fore. In the desolation of his youth, in his moodiness, 
in his distempered variation between the extremes of 
laughter and tears, in his yearning for sympathy, his 
intensity of friendship, his fits of misanthropy, his 
habit of brooding over the mj^steries of life, Byron un- 
consciously played the part of Hamlet with the world 
for his stage, and left a kindred problem for the wonder 
of mankind and the puzzled speculation of the curious 
in such matters. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

NOVELISTS FROM MRS. RADCLIFFE TO BULWER LTTTON 

STERNE — MISS EDGEWORTH— HANNAH MORE — JANE AUSTEN — 
' ' WAVERLEY " — MISS MITFORD — MRS. SHELLEY — ' ' VIVIAN 
GREY " — " PELHAM " 

I mentioned in a previous lecture on novelists that 
in the half century or more between Sterne — the last of 
the great group of novelists in the middle of the eigh- 
teenth century — and Scott, between "Tristram Shandy" 
and " Waverley," the chief honors of novel-writing were 
carried off by women — Miss Burney, Mrs. Radcliffe, 
Miss Edgeworth, and Miss Austen. These four names 
stand out above the crowd as being not imitators, but 
writers of sufficient original genius and sufficiently for- 
tunate in the novelty of their subjects to be ranked as 
leaders, as founders of schools or epochs in a small way. 
I have already spoken of the first two, whose triumphs 
lay within the eighteenth century ; I will now say a 
few words to indicate the historical position of Miss 
Edgeworth and Miss Austen. 

Miss Edgeworth was about four years older than 
Scott, being born in 1767, but she had fourteen years 
the start of him in reputation as a novelist. Her first 
notable production was " Castle Rackrent," in the first 
year of the century, 1800, fourteen years before "Wa- 
verley." It broke ground in a new field, afterward 
worked to excess by craftsmen and craftswomen of all 
degrees of merit ; it was a story of Irish life, a revela- 
tion to the English novel-readers of a new condition of 
society, a new range of character and emotion. Scott 
afterward said of Miss Edgeworth 's Irish tales that they 



276 FROM MRS. RADCLIFFE TO BULWER LYTTON 

had done more to bind Irishmen and Englishmen to- 
gether than the Union. She certainly elevated the 
character of the Irish peasantry in the interest of the 
world, showing the good and amiable qualities that 
underlay the too obvious indolence and thriftlessness 
and squalor — the gayety of heart, the readiness of wit, 
the tenacious steadfastness of attachment, the helpful 
generosity in distress. Miss Edgeworth was a realist, 
and she did not fail to put the unfavorable traits into 
her picture ; but she treated the failings of the Irish 
tenderly, as if she loved them on the whole. The Paddy 
of fiction and the stage is really her creation ; she is 
the author of his existence in literature, of the sly, 
ready-witted, fluent, faithful, and generous Paddy. 
Herself the daughter of an Irish landowner, Edgeworth 
of Edgeworthstown, she had not seen Ireland till she 
was sixteen, and was thus all the better fitted to be im- 
pressed with the peculiarities that might have escaped 
her notice if she had lived among them from infancy. 
She was brought very closely in contact with the poor 
people of Ireland as well as with the landed families of 
various ranks, for her father, an enthusiastic man of 
progress, full of eighteenth-century philanthropic and 
educational theories, and ever ready to make ingenious 
experiments of his own, having resolved to reside on his 
Irish estates, resolved also to get rid of middlemen as 
the curse of the land system, and employed his daughter 
practically as his steward and factor. For years of her 
life she had every day to grant interviews to her father's 
tenants, hear excuses and grievances, settle disputes, 
answer petitions; and on rent days more particularly 
her hands were full. Miss Edgeworth's knowledge of 
Irish life was thus most intimate, and she had a keen 
eye for the humorous side of it, while her observations 
were not permitted to degenerate into aimless caricature 
or disguised satire by good-sense and real sympathy 
with the people. " Castle Rackrent " is the story of 



MISS EDGE WORTH'S " CASTLE RACKRENT " 277 

an Irish landed family, put into the mouth of an old 
steward who in his time had served several landlords of 
the stock in succession — Sir Patrick, Sir Murtagh, Sir 
Kit, and Sir Condey, men of different character, but all 
agreeing in doing their best, whether by lavish ex- 
penditure, gambling, or avaricious litigation, to help on 
the ruin consummated by the last of the series. The 
faithful old retainer admires them all with all their faults, 
and seen through his indulgent eyes their crimes and 
their follies, their freaks of wild expenditure, and their 
matter-of-course extortions from their tenantry, their 
love-making, their hospitality, their family quarrels, 
and the dealings all the time of the too faithful steward 
with the artful tenants, excite in the reader an extraor- 
dinary mixture of laughter and pity. 

Miss Edgeworth never surpassed this her first work 
of note, and in some respects did not again come up to 
it. She had been engaged before with her father in 
writing stories for children, stories with a moral and 
educational purpose. It was the age when Hannah 
More's tales, intended to counteract the influence of the 
French Revolution and teach the common people to 
rely upon the virtues of content, sobriety, humility, 
industry, reverence for the British Constitution, trust 
in God, and in the kindness of the gentry, were circu- 
lating in thousands and hundreds of thousands. It was 
natural that moralists, in a generation distinguished for 
its philanthropic endeavor, all the more conspicuous 
that philanthropy was a new passion among the upper 
classes — it was natural that in a generation which pro- 
duced Wilberforce and Clarkson, the agitation for the 
abolition of the slave-trade, and the impeachment of 
Warren Hastings for the oppression of the Hindus, 
moralists should try to press into their service the 
revived art of story-telling, for the productions of which 
the reading public were so clamorous. Miss Edgeworth 
is sometimes called the inventor of the novel with a 



278 FROM MBS. BADCLIFFE TO BULAVEE LVTTON 

purpose ; but it was really the invention of the age, and 
I don't think she can claim the merit of being the first 
in the field. She was, pei'haps, the first novelist with a 
purpose entitled to high rank on purely artistic grounds. 
It was her father apparently, between whom and herself 
there was the closest confidence, and who was from first 
to last her literary director, dictator, and censor, — not 
wholby, it is supposed, to the advantage of her art, — who 
insisted upon her devoting her talents to the purpose of 
moral education. The fact certainly is in support of 
this prevalent belief, that " Castle Rackrent " was the 
only novel written by her without his superintendence. 
She eluded her director in this, and wrote it as a little 
surprise for him. And it is the only one of her novels 
that has no obvious and obtruded lesson. There is no 
harm, even from the artistic point of view, in writing 
novels with a moral purpose. Novelists, whether they 
intend it or not, by the very fact that they represent 
human beings in action, and so furnish examples that 
readers, consciously or unconsciously, imitate, just as 
they imitate their own companions in real life, must influ- 
ence conduct ; from the very nature of their art they can- 
not avoid influencing conduct ; and it is desirable that 
they should endeavor to influence conduct for the better, 
and not for the worse. But they are apt to miss their aim 
as well as injure their story by making the behavior of 
their characters unnatural, and the incidents that befall 
them impossible, if they allow the deliberate enforce- 
ment of a moral to influence the probable evolution of a 
story out of given characters and given circumstances. 
Miss Edgeworth fell into this error in several of her 
stories with a purpose. In "Belinda," for example, one 
of her tales of fashionable life, one of the most brill- 
iantly drawn characters in fiction, Lady Delacour, is 
converted by the force of circumstances from a gay, 
heartless, daringly cynical leader of fashion into a model 
wife, and that, too, after years of outrageous frivolity. 



NOVELS WRITTEN" WITH A MORAL PURPOSE 279 

In another story, " Ennui," Lord Glenthorne, a young 
nobleman so rich that he has no interest in any thing, 
and spends his time till he reaches middle life in torpid 
vacuity and listless search for amusement, is suddenly 
changed by the loss of his fortune into a model of 
industry, applying himself with indefatigable persever- 
ance to the most repulsive studies, and distancing every 
competitor in fields to which they have given the appli- 
cation of all their lives and all their abilities. Such 
sudden revolutions of habits in middle life are not true 
to nature ; long-confirmed habits are not thrown off by 
real human beings with such ease. The novelist repre- 
sents them as taking place, not in her function of a painter 
of manners, but in pursuance of a moral purpose. Lady 
Delacour's conversion is intended as an encouragement 
to ladies of fashion to abandon heartless flirtation and 
vain display ; they are supposed to be struck with the 
greater happiness of the lad} 7 in her regenerate condi- 
tion. And Lord Glenthorne's conversion is intended as 
an incentive to noble lords to discard unworthy amuse- 
ment, and experience the greater happiness of energies 
devoted to nobler pursuits. Such is the novelist's ob- 
vious intention ; but whether such pictures are likely 
to do more harm than good is not so clear, for the ease 
with which these interesting reprobates shake off their 
long-indulged habits is apt to encourage would-be imi- 
tators of their ultimate good conduct to defer the period 
of amendment till it is too late. I admit, however, that 
from the moralist's point of view, quite apart from 
strict adherence to human probabilities, there is some- 
thing to be said on the other side, and that the delight 
taken by the converts in their altered course of conduct 
may be rendered more potent as an example by the fact 
that they are represented as deriving no real pleasure 
from the pleasure-seeking of their un regenerate days. 
It would, however, give an entirely wrong idea of Miss 
Edgeworth's novels to lay much stress on their moral 



280 FROM MRS. RADCLIFFE TO BITLWER LYTTON 

purpose. Apart from their purpose, tliey are most brill- 
iant pictures of life. The moral is not constantly 
obtruded, as in Hannah More's celebrated " Coelebs in 
Search of a Wife," published while Miss Edgeworth was 
in the height of her popularity. The reader, especially 
the young lady reader, is preached at from beginning 
to end of that excellent work ; the only incidents in 
Mr. Coelebs's career are his visits to various families in 
the course of his deliberate search, the only surprises 
consist in the discovery of weak points in superficially 
pleasing young ladies, and sterling qualities in the super- 
ficially unattractive. We are not led to feel the slightest 
interest in the issue of Mr. Coelebs's great enterprise; 
there is nothing shown in him to make us care whether 
he finds a woman worthy of his fastidious choice or not. 
Yet Hannah More was far from being a dull writer, and 
in the exposure of affectation and pretence and shallow- 
ness she showed a very fine sense of humor. Only, her 
book is not a story, but a string of journalistic social 
articles on the minor and the higher morals. Now, 
Miss Edgeworth is not so avowedly and obtrusively 
didactic as this. She is seldom so clear and decided 
in her purpose as, for example, Mr. Wilkie Collins in 
"Heart and Science," or Mr. Besant in "All Sorts and 
Conditions of Men." She took an interest, either for 
herself or at her father's instigation, in various social 
reforms, and did her best to advance them incidentally, 
as Dickens did in "Nicholas Nickleby " or "Dombey 
and Son." The proportion of direct didactic in her 
writings is really comparatively small, while her pictures 
of life, as it was to be seen in fashionable society and 
on Irish estates, were as faithful and complete as they 
were animated, sensible, and humorous. Miss Edge- 
worth must certainly be pronounced to have gone out of 
fashion, seeing that Miss Broughton ran a tale through 
one of the magazines with the title of "Belinda," with- 
out any body remarking, in print, at least, that this was 



miss austen's "pride and prejudice" 281 

the title of one of Miss Edgeworth's most famous 
novels. Whether Miss Zimmern's pleasantly written 
biography in the Eminent Women of Letters 
Series will do any thing to restore her faded popu- 
larity is doubtful ; and yet novel-readers who have 
exhausted the novels of their own generation might 
do worse than give "Belinda" or "Castle Rack- 
rent " a trial. 

If I were to judge from my own experience, I should 
not recommend Miss Austen's " Pride and Prejudice" 
or " Sense and Sensibility," still less " Mansfield Park" 
or " Emma," with the same confidence to confirmed 
novel-readers of the present day. Nobody can read 
any of Miss Austen's works without admiring her 
wonderful closeness and keenness of humorous observa- 
tion, the skill with which she displays every turn in the 
motives of commonplace character, and the exquisite 
quality of the ridicule with which her fancy dances 
round and round them as she holds them up to our 
inspection. If you once make the acquaintance of the 
Ben net family in " Pride and Prejudice," you can never 
forget them, so distinctly is each individual marked, 
and so keen and exquisite is the revelation of their 
foibles. In mere art of humorous portraiture, in a 
quieter and less farcical style than Miss Burney's, Miss 
Austen is an expert of classical finish. But somehow, 
speaking for myself, I must confess to a certain want 
of interest in the characters themselves. Unless one is 
really interested in the subjects of such an elaborate art 
of portraiture, the gradual revelation of them, touch 
after touch, is apt to become tedious, however much 
one may enjoy for a time the quick and delicate play 
of the writer's gently malicious humor. But this want 
of interest in the characters of English middle-class 
provincial life is of course a personal defect. You will 
find that Mrs. Oliphant writes with rapture about her 
great predecessor in fiction, and I dare say you have 



282 FROM MRS. RADCLIFFE TO BULWER LYTTON 

read somewhere Sir Walter Scott's often-quoted com- 
pliment to her. " Read again, and for the third time 
at least, Miss Austen's very finely written ' Pride and 
Prejudice,'" he entered in his Diary. "That young 
lady had a talent for describing the involvements and 
feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me 
the most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow- 
wow strain I can do myself, like any now going ; but 
the exquisite touch which renders ordinary common- 
place things and characters interesting from the truth 
of the description and the sentiment is denied to me. 
What a pity such a gifted creature died so early." Sir 
Walter also reviewed her novels in the Quarterly, 
and helped to bring them into notice. In one respect 
she had a great and legitimate attraction for novel- 
readers of her own time that she no longer possesses. 
Her field of manners-painting was new ; nobody before 
her had taken scenes and characters from the life of 
the provinces, though Miss Burney had had hosts of 
imitators in the description of fashionable life in the 
metropolis. And she had another distinction also, not 
so striking now, in the fact that when fiction was over- 
run with romantic sentiment and improbable incident, 
workers in the hackneyed paths having reached a despi- 
cable level when her first novel made its appearance in 
1811, she restricted herself to ordinary every-day char- 
acter, and never went beyond probability either in con- 
duct or in incident. Miss Austen was the daughter of 
the rector of Steventon, a parish in Hampshire ; and 
after her father's death, and before publishing her 
novels, she lived for some years with her mother at 
Southampton, and for some time at Bath. All the 
material of her novels is such as might have come 
within the range of her own limited personal experience, 
and she treats her characters and comments on their 
conduct very much as she and her family were in the 
habit of looking at and criticising the life of their own 



LADY MORGAN AND HER AGE 283 

neighborhood. Hence the vividness, the fresh air of 
reality, that is one of the secrets of her power as a 
novelist ; her figures are not lay-figures or creations of 
vacuous fancy, but real men and women, represented 
not in accordance with any merely conventional canons 
of art, but as such characters presented themselves to 
her in real life. 

Another female novelist, who never took the classical 
rank accorded to Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen, but 
who was a very conspicuous and much-discussed per- 
sonage in her day, also achieved her first successes 
before the publication of " Waverley." This was Miss 
Sydney Owenson, afterward Lady Morgan. With the 
usual longevity of women of letters, to which Miss 
Austen was an exception, dying in 1817 at the com- 
paratively early age of forty-two, Lady Morgan lived 
and continued to write till 1859, although she was 
an eminent author several years before Miss Austen 
emerged from the obscurity of Hampshire. Where she 
was born remained to the last a mysteiy, and her 
biographer, Mr. Ilepworth Dixon, respected her wishes 
on the point, and either did not attempt to discover or, 
if he did discover anything, kept the secret. Tolerably 
early in her career a great point was publicly made 
against her by one of her critics, Mr. J. Wilson Croker, 
because she pretended to be younger than she really 
was, and this was probably the reason why she never 
would tell, and was unwilling that the little fact should 
be known after her death. Lad} T Morgan's age, brought 
into prominence by the ungallant man of dates Croker, 
who did not like her politics, — Croker was the original 
of Rigby in Disraeli's " Coningsby," — was a disputed 
point for nearly half a century. Writing to the 
Athenwum in 1859 (January 22) apropos of some 
allusion to her age, the lively old lady made the follow- 
ing rhyme : 



284 FROM MRS. RADCLIFFE TO BULWER LYTTON 

" Then talk not to me of my age ; 

I appeal from the phrase to the fact 
That I'm told in your own brilliant page 
I'm still young in fun, fancy, and tact." 

She made her first appearance as a novelist in 1804 
with " St. Clair," and followed this up with " The Novice 
of St. Dominick" and " The Wild Irish Girl" in 1806. 
According to her own account, she was still in her teens 
•when she wrote " The Wild Irish Girl," which made her 
reputation, but the statistical Croker maintained that 
she was born in 1770. There is documentary evidence 
that she was at a boarding-school in Dublin in 1794, 
and at that time considered herself too old to sit on her 
father's knee ; but certainly twenty-four would be a 
mature age for a school-girl, so that Croker was for once 
out in his dates, though he pretended to have consulted 
a register. The lad} r , it is needless to say, paid the 
critic out ; she made him sit for the portrait of one of 
her most odious, sycophantic, unscrupulous political 
adventurers, Con Crawley in " Florence MacCarthy." 
Croker must have had a thick skin if he felt none of the 
shafts that were levelled at him. Macaulay ridiculed 
him heartily in his essay on Boswell's Johnson, and 
Disraeli's Rigby is one of the most cutting of the satires 
of that master of the art. The beginning of Croker's 
dislike to Lady Morgan, whom he attacked with a viru- 
lent personality not uncommon at the time, but long 
since out of fashion, was her politics. She followed 
Miss Edge worth in choosing her subjects from her native 
country of Ireland ; but she was herself a different type 
of Irishwoman from that cool, sensible, impartially 
humorous lady — enthusiastic, romantic, inordinately 
fond of excitement and social notoriety. She drew 
her ideal of her own character in " The Wild Irish 
Girl " Glorvina. Two of her Irish novels, — "Florence 
MacCarthy" (1818) and "The O'Briens and the 
O'Flahertys" (1827), — may still be read with interest. 



REV. CHARLES MATURIN 285 

The character of Florence MacCarthy is charming ; 
Phyllis French, in a recent novel by Frank Lee Bene- 
dict, " The Price she Paid," is an evident copy of her. 
Lady Morgan may have seen the original from which 
she drew in the earlier part of her life, for she was the 
daughter of an Irish actor, and had seen a good deal 
of Bohemian life before she acquired distinction as an 
authoress and was taken up by the Abercorn family, 
and married almost by stratagem to the family physician, 
Sir Charles Morgan. 

Another Irish novelist deserves a word of mention, if 
only for the singularity of his career, the Rev. Charles 
Maturin, curate of St. Peter's in Dublin. Maturin had 
the curious fortune to attract the attention of some of 
the greatest magnates of literature in his time, who were 
struck by the power of his writing and his conception of 
situation and character, and believed one after another 
that it was possible for him to cure himself of the wild 
rhapsodical extravagance b} r which his productions were 
disfigured. He followed up Lady Morgan's " Wild Irish 
Girl " with a " Wild Irish Boy," and a romance of his, 
"The Family of Montoria, or, The Fatal Revenge," fell 
into Scott's hands in 1810, and was reviewed by him 
in the Quarterly. Maturin professed himself entirely 
convinced by the criticisms of his friends, acknowledged 
that his previous works were failures, and undertook to 
keep himself within the bounds of probability in the 
novel of " Women, or, Pour et Contre." His heroine 
Zaira was a great artist of unhappy domestic life, a study 
of the same kind as Mme. de Stael's " Corinne " or 
George Sand's " Consuelo." It is not an uncommon 
type in recent fiction ; Miss Bertha Thomas's " Violin- 
Player" is a recent example. Maturin had also a 
tragedjr, "Bertram," produced at Drury Lane in 1818, 
through the influence of Lord Byron, which had the 
honor of being critically dissected by Coleridge. But 



286 FROM MRS. RADCLIFFE TO BULWER LTTTON 

he never overcame his tendency to absurd extravagance 
of expression and wild improbability, though we can 
understand wby it was tbat the great critics of the time 
continued to hope that he would tone down. 

Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, Miss Owenson, and 
the wild Irish boy Maturin were in full swing when 
" Waverley " appeared in 1814, and was followed at short 
intervals by a series of novels received with an excite- 
ment to which there is hardly a parallel in our litera- 
ture — no parallel at all, if we except the novels of 
Dickens. It would be absurd to attempt any criticism 
on the Waverley Novels in a fragment of a lecture, and 
the chief facts about the reception of them and the 
life of the great novelist during their composition are 
doubtless familiar to you all. I have already sketched 
for you how he laid the foundation for his extraordinary 
rapidity of production once he began to write novels. 
It was not, strictly speaking, impromptu writing, as 
Carlyle tauntingly described it ; not impromptu in the 
sense of being writing without any previous prepara- 
tion ; it was rapid in virtue of great previous enthu- 
siasm and industry in the accumulation of materials. 
He could not in so short a space of time have painted 
the costumes and manners and characters of so many 
different periods, from the eleventh century to the 
eighteenth, in Scotland, in England, on the Continent, 
if his mind had not been full of them before he began 
to write, and that familiarity had been obtained by 
years of labor in regions dry as dust to all but the 
enthusiastic antiquary. Special students of the present 
day can point to a good many errors of detail in Scott's 
medisevalism, though chiefly on trifling points ; but we 
must compare his romances with other so-called historical 
romances before his time, if we are to do justice to the 
extraordinary range of his historical knowledge, quite 
apart from his genius in reviving the life of the past. 



APPEARANCE OF " AVAVERLEY " 28V 

Miss Jane Porter's "Scottish Chiefs" was one of the 
first historical novels produced in this century, and the 
lady was always proud of having set the example to Scott ; 
but there is very little i*eal local color in her account 
of the adventures of Wallace and Bruce — there is hardly 
an attempt made to keep to historical probability. You 
will find in the introductions which he wrote for his 
novels shortly before his death an account of the actual 
incidents that suggested the various plots ; but he 
would have had to go back over his life to his boyhood, 
when he devoured every history he could lay his hands 
on, in order to trace the origin of the resources that 
enabled him to clothe with such richness of costume and 
incident the bare skeleton of story that served him as 
a starting-point. It would seem that it was almost an 
accident that he did not begin writing prose romances 
before his metrical tales, and he humorously observes 
in the introduction to " Waverley " that if his readers 
were inclined to complain of his fertility in novel-writ- 
ing, they had reason to congratulate themselves that he 
was comparatively advanced in life before he began. 
He did make two beginnings, one in 1800 and another 
in 1805, of which you will find an account in the intro- 
duction to " Waverley"; but he threw them aside for 
one reason or another. It was the success of Miss Edge- 
worth's Irish tales, he tells us, that finally determined 
him to try to do for the people and scenery of Scotland 
what she had done for Ireland. 

You all know the great calamity of Scott's life, the 
heroic courage with which he faced it, and the amazing 
power with which he labored cheerfully to retrieve his 
misfortune. You know how he connected himself with 
the printing and publishing business of the Ballantynes 
and Constable ; how in 1826, after earning unexampled 
sums b} r his novels, he found himself involved in liabili- 
ties to the amount of £170,000 ; and how he set himself 
to clear off this enormous load, toiling from morning 



288 FROM MRS. RADCLIFFE TO BULWEK LYTTON 

till night till paralysis came upon him, and he broke 
down in the struggle, not, however, till he had accom- 
plished the object of his honorable determination. His 
ambition had been very different in his prosperous days, 
to found another great territorial family of Scotts ; but 
he labored for the five years that his powers lasted with 
even greater energy to redeem his name from the 
fancied disgrace of a debt that was not of his own con- 
tracting. You know also that he did not avow the 
authorship of the Waverley Novels till this misfortune 
overtook him. 

At first he was afraid of his reputation as a poet, and 
afterward he kept up the disguise from no definite reason, 
but simply because he liked it. He did not like to appear 
in society as a literary lion, and he delighted in having 
a secret all to himself, and in being the centre of a mys- 
tery. Carlyle's fierce criticism of the novels was that 
they were not profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for 
edification, for building up or elevating in any shape. 
Scott, as Carlyle said, certainly gave by his novels im- 
mense pleasure to indolent and languid readers, but he 
also brought all classes of readers together by his sympa- 
thetic delineations of characters in humble life. No 
novelist in any century has exercised a more health}' and 
beneficial influence. 

Professor Masson has collected some curious statistics 
showing the enormous impulse given to novel-writing by 
the success of the Waverley Novels. In 1820, when they 
were at the height of their popularity, the number pub- 
lished, or received at the British Museum, was 26, an 
average of 1 every fortnight. Ten years later, when 
the series was nearly finished, in 4830, the number 
received was 101, nearly an average of 2 a week. 
And it would appear from the British Museum Cata- 
logue that the average has been pretty steadily main- 
tained since. I doubt, however, whether the authorities 
of the Museum have always been careful to avail them- 



CURIOUS STATISTICS ANENT NOVEL-WRITING 289 

selves of their rights, for in several cases, having occa- 
sion to see if possible the first editions of various novels, 
I have found, rather to my surprise, that a novel is 
represented there by an edition issued years after its 
first appearance. 

Among the host of novel-writers who made their first 
appearance in the ten years after the date of " Waverley " 
the three of most marked originality and distinction 
were women — Miss Ferrier, Mrs. Shelley, and Miss Mit- 
ford. Even after Scott, Miss Ferrier found something 
fresh in the humorous observation of Scottish character. 
We have seen how he compared his own bow-wow style 
with the more realistic modern art of Miss Austen, and 
envied her power of entering into the humor of ordi- 
nary respectable characters. Miss Ferrier had the gift 
which he lacked, and exercised it with great felicity in 
her novels of " Marriage " and " The Inheritance." 

Mrs. Shelley, the daughter of William Godwin, him- 
self a novelist of considerable repute at the end of the 
eighteenth century, wrote only one novel, but the con- 
ception was so original and unique that it is not likely 
to be soon forgotten. This was " Frankenstein." It 
appeared in 1818, and had the honor of being reviewed 
by Scott, who found time for all sorts of miscellaneous 
literary work even when his greatest novels were on the 
anvil. Mrs. Shelley boldly accepted Horace Walpole's 
idea of taking the utmost license as regarded probability 
of incident, concentrating her power upon imagining 
how her hero felt and acted in his supernatural circum- 
stances. The hero was a German student who had by 
unwearied vigils discovered the secret of imparting life 
to inanimate matter, and who constructed a gigantic 
monster and was terribly persecuted by his own crea- 
tion. 

Very different in character was the work of Miss Mit- 
ford, one of the most delightful and natural and ge- 
nially humorous writers in the language. Her sketches 
19 



290 FROM MRS. RADCLIFFE TO BULWEE LYTTON 

of life in " Our Village," of the " Talking Lady," the 
" Talking Gentlemen," of poachers, seamstresses, domes- 
tic servants, young men and old men of local note, 
remain, after half a century of imitations, as fresh as if 
they had been written yesterday. No human being ever 
had a cheerier or more sympathetic outlook on the 
world. Her sympathies, with a certain waywardness, 
turned rather toward characters that the respectable 
world frowns upon, with lawless, good-hearted charac- 
ters and coquettish beauties. She liked to show the 
good side of such beings to the world. Like Miss 
Edgeworth, she had a father, but a veiy different father 
from the energetic, inventive, philanthropic, restless 
squire of Edgeworthstown. Dr. Mitford was an " awful 
dad," a scapegrace who spent his wife's fortune in a few 
years, ran rapidly through a lottery prize which his little 
girl had the good fortune to draw, and in his old age 
subsisted on the small remnant of his fortune and the 
proceeds of his daughter's literary industry. Yet his 
daughter adored him, and took infinite delight in his 
"friskings," as she called his little eccentricities, living 
in a small house that was a lesson in condensation, 
refusing all holiday invitations from her wealthy rela- 
tions, never stopping in her literary work except to read 
the sporting newspaper to the graceless companion who 
called her his " mamma," and was the stay, support, and 
admiration of all the loafers in the neighborhood. Miss 
Mitford's early ambition was to be " the greatest Eng- 
lish poetess," and when she was little more than twenty 
her metrical tales were praised by Scott in the Quar- 
terly, while some years later tragedies from her pen 
were highly successful at Covent Garden. The short 
tales and sketches collected under the title of " Our Vil- 
lage " were written originally for a magazine, purely for 
the supply of the household, and yet they brought her 
more enduring fame than her poetry. They had an influ- 
ence on the early manner of Dickens, and may almost 



RISE OF THE FASHIONABLE NOVEL 291 

be said to Lave founded a school of periodical sketch- 
writing. 

The natural result of the interest created in author- 
ship by Scott and Byron in fashionable society was the 
rise of a school of fashionable novelists. This was the 
chief literary phenomenon of the last five years of the 
reign of George IV., the last five years of our period. 
Of the fashionable novels then in fresh repute only two 
arc now much remembered, Disraeli's " Vivian Grey " 
and Bulwer Lytton's " Pelham." But there was a 
large cluster of them, all with something of the same 
character, and that something new. The authors were 
men moving in the society which they attempted to 
describe. Up to that time fashionable life had been 
described by women ; now the young dandies, — sucking 
diplomatists, politicians, and statesmen, — seized upon the 
novel as a dramatic vehicle for conveying their views 
on the manners of society and the affairs of the State. 
It is an interesting thing for the historian to have 
had the inner life of political society so copiously 
described before the Reform Bill, which produced such 
a change in the political power of the upper hundreds ; 
we have vividly depicted in the pages of these novels 
the old state of things, and we are brought into immedi- 
ate contact with the ardent, fiery spirit of the young 
ambitions that were awakened by the prospect of change. 
" Vivian Grey " and " Pelham " have been kept alive by 
the subsequent reputation of their authors ; but there 
were three other authors who fairly shared with them 
the applause of contemporaries. Mr. Plumer Ward's 
" Tremaine, or, The Man of Refinement," was the first 
of the series ; then followed Mr. Lister's " Granby "; 
then side by side Disraeli and Bulwer and Lord 
Normanby. 



CHAPTER XIX 

SHELLEY AND KEATS 

SHELLEY — VARIOUS CONCEPTIONS OP THE POET — CHARACTER — 
KEATS — THE REVIEWERS — CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS POETRY — 
" ENDYMION " AND "HYPERION" 

The common judgment of Shelley, at least as expressed 
in literary organs, has undergone a complete revolution 
since he was a living man. Nobody now would venture 
to publish an article about Shelley without copious 
protestations of admiration for the poet, whatever the 
opinion might be expressed about his conduct as a man. 
To acknowledge indifference to his poetry would be 
to set one's self against an overwhelming weight of 
authoritative opinion. To deny him equal rank with 
any poet of his generation would be heresy. Enjoy- 
ment of Shelley is often put forward as a test of poetic 
sensibility; if Shelley does not delight } T ou, you are set 
down as not being capable of knowing what poetry is. 
He is now par excellence the poet's poet. 

But it was otherwise when his poems first appeared. 
He received hardly a word of cordial recognition from 
any critical organ of authority, except from his friend 
Leigh Hunt's journal, the Examiner. The potentates 
and powers of criticism — the Quarterly, the Edinburgh 
Review, Blackwood's, and Literary Gazette, — were 
unanimous in derision and denunciation. That such 
stuff as "Alastor" and "The Revolt of Islam " should 
pretend to be poetry was hailed as one of the most 
ludicrous pretensions in an age fertile in ludicrous 
literary pretensions. It was a mere incoherent farce 
of meaningless imagery, a collection of lines pretty 

090 



VARIOUS CONCEPTIONS OF SHELLEY 293 

enough in themselves, but the most hollow of empti- 
nesses; mere sound and fury, signifying nothing. In so 
far as any meaning was discernible through the iridescent 
vapor of words, the critics did not like it. The poet's 
designs, in so far as they could be made out, were im- 
moral, anarchic, atheistic ; whenever he deviated into 
intelligibility, it was to rave against all law and order, 
human and divine, to rave with fierce, shrill, hysterical 
vituperation against all that other men held sacred. 
There were reports also, which the critics did not fail 
to publicly notice, about his private conduct which 
accounted for his mad rebellion against established 
order. It was said that he was a young man who had 
been expelled from Oxford for an atheistic publication ; 
that he had married a school-girl and deserted her, with 
the result that she committed suicide ; and that he had 
persuaded another young girl of sixteen to run away 
with him while his first wife was still alive. In short, 
the poetry was effeminate, hysterical, and contemptible, 
in so far as it was not dangerous and unsettling ; while 
the poet himself was a disreputable profligate against 
whom all respectable persons should set their faces. 

Such was the conception of Shelley which all readers 
of the leading organs of public opinion in his generation 
were invited to entertain. As far as his poetry was 
concerned, not a little of the animus against it was due 
to its strangeness, its novelty, its unlikeness to any thing 
that had been published before in verse. Even if the 
circumstances had been favorable to its receiving a fair 
judgment as poetry, we may .well doubt whether on its 
first appearance the critics would not have treated it as 
a flock of birds might treat a new-comer in gorgeous 
but unfamiliar plumage. We must remember, also, that 
Shelley's first noticeable works, " Alastor " and " The 
Revolt of Islam," were deficient in many of the great 
qualities of his later works, and were justly liable to the 
reproach of incoherent copiousness and obscurity. But 



294 SHELLEY AND KEATS 

there were accidental circumstances calculated to 
strengthen any prejudice that might be against Shelley's 
poetry, based on its own intrinsic defects and difficulties. 
The literary world was divided more sharply than at 
any time before or since into hostile factions, and 
provincial and political enmities were allowed to bias 
literary judgments to a degree of flagrancy now almost 
incredible. There was the Edinburgh Review clique 
under the banner of Jeffre}", and the Blackwood clique 
under the banner of Wilson, and the Quarterly clique 
under the banner of Gifford, and the Examiner clique 
under the banner of Leigh Hunt. Men like Scott and 
Byron, with their bold, direct, intelligible address to 
the great body of readers, swept past these guardians of 
the gates of the Temple of Fame straight to their des- 
tination. But if a poet was not easily understood by 
the multitude, if he needed an interpreter or a sponsor, 
or a kindly word of introduction, and had not friends 
in more than one camp, praise from one quarter was 
more than likely to awaken hostility in every other. 
There was a jealousy between Edinburgh and London 
of which any new aspirant might be made the victim. 
Hard things were said in the London organs about the 
Scottish critics, and the Scottish critics, proud of the 
renown of Modern Athens, asserted themselves in violent 
denunciation of every thing Cockney. No words were 
too bitterly contemptuous for the Cockney school of 
poetry ; they had an ideal Cockney in their minds, 
compounded of vulgarity, bad taste, effusive sentimen- 
tality, affected prettiness, and they poured the vials of 
their scornful mockery upon every poem published in 
London in which there was a suspicion of these qualities. 
Then there was a political jealousy between Tory, Whig, 
and Radical, in the interests of which a new poem was 
sharply scrutinized and cordially welcomed or denounced 
according to the creed of the reviewer. The Quarterly 
and BlacJcivood , s, the champions of Toryism, and the 



THE VARIOUS CLIQUES OF CRITICS 295 

Edinburgh, the champion of Whiggery, had an almost 
equally keen scent for a revolutionary. Any discontent 
with the established order of things, beyond such dis- 
content as was recognized in the Whig programme, was 
sure to draw down from the Quarterly and Blackwood' 's 
a charge of Jacobinism, atheism, and infidelity, and to 
insure that the .Edinburgh should either join in the cry 
or pass over in silence the work in which the dangerous 
doctrines appeared. The situation was still further 
complicated by purely literary factions, factions based 
on difference of literary creed. By 1818 the reverence 
for the traditions of the eighteenth century had been 
rudely shaken ; but there were still among the critics 
a good many who shook their heads over modern innova- 
tions and sighed for the good old style. The new 
edition of Pope had given an occasion for comparing 
the old with the new, and Gifford of the Quarterly was 
a bigoted, hard, and vehement supporter of Pope, ever 
ready to launch out with all his energy of invective 
against unexpected novelties. Now, Shelley had the 
misfortune to concentrate on his person the lightnings 
of no less than three great factions. Before he pub- 
lished " Alastor " he had connected himself publicly 
with Leigh Hunt, the leader and founder of the so-called 
Cockney school, so that Shelley, like Keats, who made 
his first essay about the same time, was regarded as a 
new development of Cockneyism. He spoke with daring 
disrespect of venerable institutions, and so incurred the 
wrath of all the literary organs of respectability. And 
in his method he departed more widely than any previous 
poet from the concise, epigrammatic, reasonable style of 
Pope, so that all who had leanings in that direction were 
doubly scandalized by his extravagances. 

The fullest expression of Shelley's character is to be 
found, of course, in his poetry ; but if that puzzles you, 
there is much that may be cleared up by a reference to 
his letters — e. g., a selection of them recently published 



296 SHELLEY AND KEATS 

by Garnett ; "Essays and Letters from Abroad," by 
Mrs. Shelley ; " Memorials of Shelley," by Lady Shelley ; 
" Records of Byron, Shelley, and his Contemporaries," 
by Trelawny. The letters are masterpieces of expression, 
frank, candid, really letters, and yet so perfect in style 
that Mr. Matthew Arnold expects the reputation of 
them to be even more enduring than his poetry. 

The key-note of Shelley's character, his ruling motive, 
was an excessively sensitive hatred of every thing in 
the shape of harshness, tyranny, injustice, carried to 
extremes that to an ordinary mind appear fantastic 
and insane. Such sensitiveness is not rare among men 
when their own interests are touched, but Shelley's 
resentment took a much wider range than a morbid 
instinct of self-defence. He could not bear the thought 
of the existence of oppression anywhere under the sun ; 
the thought of such a tiling maddened him, and kindled 
his energies to be up and doing at once for its extinc- 
tion. In his youthful vehemence he was a stranger to 
wise patience and slow, deliberate calculation of ways 
and means ; and his action, consequently, was not 
always the best action for the end in view ; but such 
was his motive — a violent, furious dislike to wrong- 
doing. Himself one of the gentlest of creatures, pla} T - 
ful, affectionate, beloved by all who knew him, he 
was capable, under this intolerable spur, of behaving 
with the fury of a demon. Nothing could be further 
from. the truth than representing Shelley as inspired by 
a blind hatred of all law and order, a violent assailant 
of established institutions because they interfered with 
the pleasure of following his own will, because they 
interposed checks between him and the execution of 
wayward, capricious, whimsical impulses. It was the 
excesses committed in the name of law and order that 
he could not endure ; the cruelties sanctioned by 
established institutions that drove him into revolt 
against them. Law and order and established institu- 



SENSITIVENESS OF SHELLEY 297 

tions offended him, not by their spirit, but by the delin- 
quencies and transgressions of their accredited ministers, 
many of Avhom, in the history of the world, have 
not merely fallen short of ideal righteousness, but, 
under the protection of sacred names, have in small 
tilings and in great committed shameful offences against 
humanity. It was the defect of Shelley's temperament 
that he was almost insanely sensitive to harshness and 
cruelty of conduct, not with a shrinking sensitiveness, 
but with the sensitiveness that flamed out in fiery 
indignation, the sensitiveness of a man who came of 
the high-spirited chivalrous race of the Sidneys. This 
spirit was the ruling principle of his conduct in small 
things as well as in great, and led him into some eccen- 
tricities that appear merely ludicrous to the ordinary 
mind, and into one eccentricity which, viewed in the 
light of its tragic consequences, has the appearance of 
a scandalous crime. For example, he would not drink 
tea with sugar, because sugar was the produce of 
slave-labor, and he ate nothing but vegetable food, 
because he believed that man had no right to kill and eat 
the lower animals. When he was a boy at Eton, he 
rebelled against the system of fagging, which was much 
abused by youthful bullies. To this he alludes in the 
often-quoted stanzas in the dedication of his " Revolt of 
Islam " : 

" Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first 
The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass. 
I do remember well the hour which burst 
My spirit's sleep : a fresh May-dawn it was, 
When I walked forth upon the glittering grass, 
And wept, I knew not why ; until there rose 
From the near schoolroom, voices, that, alas ! 
Were but an echo from the world of woes — 
The hard and grating strife of tyrants and of foes. 

" And then I clasped my hands and looked around — 
But none was near to mock my streaming eyes, 



298 SHELLEY AND KEATS 

Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground — 
So without shame I spake — ' I will be wise, 
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies 
Such power, for I grow weary to behold 
The selfish and the strong still tyrannise 
Without reproach or check.' I then controlled 
My tears ; my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold." 

It is a common statement that Shelley was expelled 
from Oxford — to which he was transferred from Eton at 
the age of nineteen, in 1811 — for publishing a tract in 
defence of Atheism. But this would appear to be not 
strictly correct. What he did was to issue a tract con- 
taining certain propositions maintained by Atheists, and 
to invite the Heads of College in Oxford to answer 
them, an invitation which they met, as De Quincey puts 
it, by "inviting " the unpractical enthusiast to withdraw 
from the University. Undoubtedly the great stain 
upon Shelley's life is his treatment of his first wife, 
Harriet Westbrook. There are papers in the hands of 
the Shelley family that have not yet been published, but 
which are said to reconcile his behavior with the high 
and honorable spirit that he showed in all other circum- 
stances. This much is already clear, that it was his 
chivalrous generosity that first connected him with the 
girl whose subsequent fate was so tragic. 

Those who seek to defend Shelley's conduct to his 
wife on the ground that he was an ethereal, impulsive 
creature, a visionary child too much wrapped up in his 
visions to be fit for ordinary human duties or to be 
judged by any ordinary standard of right and wrong, a 
being so good, so gentle, yet so fragile and so childishly 
eccentric in his impulses, that the heart shrinks from 
holding him responsible for the harmful consequences of 
impulses so devoid of malicious intention, and judg- 
ment is suspended in wondering pity — such defenders 
do great injustice to the fundamental strength of the 
poet's character, and interpose an obstacle to the under- 



shelley's view of life 299 

standing of his greater poems. He was a visionary, 
indeed, but not an aimless and drifting visionary ; the 
dreamer's eyes were fixed steadily, constantl}' upon one 
vision, the struggle between good and evil in the 
world, the vicissitudes of this struggle, and the final 
triumph of good. He read history ; he observed life ; 
but wherever he turned his eyes, all the actions of man- 
kind presented themselves as moves in the terrible 
game between these opposing principles. The centre 
of interest for him in the world-drama was the pro- 
tracted duel between good and evil. This view of life 
was natural in a generation perplexed and disturbed by 
the staggering events of the French Revolution and the 
world-wide ambition of Napoleon. The great problems 
of human destiny were forced upon all the reflective 
minds of the time, and ShelW's nature was not merely 
profoundh* meditative, but deeply interested in the issue, 
and passionately eager for a solution. A knowledge of 
his character and of his view of life is indispensable to 
the understanding of such poems as " Alastor," and 
" The Revolt of Islam," and " Prometheus Unbound." 
Without this simple key, they must always appear 
meaningless rhapsodies, incoherent mazes of sweet 
sound and beautiful imagery, without beginning, middle, 
or end, capricious ethereal movements of fancy and 
imagination leading nowhere. You cannot open their 
pages anywhere without being enchanted with the 
wonderful melody and affluence of imagery, of which 
critics labor in vain to give any idea by piling up all 
the epithets that belong to whatever is most charming 
in poetic creation. But this wonderful procession of 
forms to the music of most melodious verse is not so 
aimless as it appears at first to the dazzled senses ; it 
has a meaning and a direction even in its most seemingly 
capricious movements. The poet does not address the 
senses, but the understanding heart. Concerning "The 
Revolt of Islam," Shelley himself said, in answer to a 



300 SHELLEY AND KEATS 

letter from his friend Godwin censuring its exuberance : 
" Tbe poem was produced by a series of thoughts which 
filled ray mind with unbounded and sustained enthu- 
siasm. I felt the precariousness of my life, and I 
resolved in this book to leave some records of myself. 
Much of what the volume contains was written with the 
same feeling, as real though not so prophetic, as the 
communications of a dying man. . . I felt that it 
was in many respects a genuine picture of my own 
mind. I felt that the sentiments were true, not 
assumed ; and in this I have long believed — that my 
power consists in sympathy, and that part of imagina- 
tion which relates to sentiment and contemplation." 

The lofty strain in which " Alastor " opens gives us 
an idea of the intense passion with which he composed 
his poetry : 

" Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood ! 
If our great Mother has imbued my soul 
With aught of natural piety to feel 
Your love, and recompense the boon with mine ; 
If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even, 
"With sunset and its gorgeous ministers, 
And solemn midnight's tingling silentness ; 
If autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood, 
And winter robing with pure snow and crowns 
Of starry ice the grey grass and bare boughs ; 
If spring's voluptuous pantings when she breathes 
Her first sweet kisses, have been dear to me ; 
If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast 
I consciously have injured, but still loved 
And cherished these my kindred ; — then forgive 
This boast, beloved brethren, and withdraw 
No portion of your wonted favour now ! " 

The poem, in short, is an allegory. Like all intricate 
allegories, it is difficult to interpret, and the difficulty is 
increased by the fact that the allegory is not, as in the 
case of Spenser's " Faery Queen " or Tennyson's " Idylls " 
a separate stream of story, complete and intelligible in 



"stanzas written in dejection" 301 

itself, but a stream that is often interposed with the 
realities that it is intended to represent. Its full inter- 
pretation in every particular is perhaps impossible, 
because the poet was intent only upon the expression of 
his own thought and feeling, and to understand every 
turn of this we should have to read the histories that he 
read, see the sights that he saw, and track him through 
his study of the speculations of his time ; but the general 
drift of the allegory is obvious enough, if we only recog- 
nize it as a vision of the vicissitudes of the struggle 
between good and evil, in which sometimes the apparent 
triumphs of good become the most terrible instruments 
of evil, and sometimes the triumphs of evil become benefi- 
cent instruments of good, while in the end the principle 
of good is victorious. " Alastor," "The Revolt of 
Islam," and " Prometheus " are all poetic embodiments 
of the same view of the history of man and the same 
ardent hopes for his future. I would remind you again 
of the Wordsworthian theory of poetry as the spon- 
taneous overflow of powerful feelings, and of what I 
said as to the height and intricacy of the structure that 
the imagination may raise at the original bidding of the 
simplest of emotional motives. If Byron interpreted 
Wordsworth to the multitude, Shelley may be said to 
have interpreted him to those who make poetry a 
study. 

Among his shorter poems you will find some of the 
most exquisite poetry in the language, the " Ode to the 
West Wind," for example, being held by many to be 
the finest English lyric. The " Stanzas written in 
Dejection " might be cited as another example, the 
concluding lines of which are exquisitely beautiful 
and pathetic : 

" Alas ! I have nor hope, nor health, 
Nor peace within, nor calm around, 
Nor that content, surpassing wealth, 
The sage in meditation found, 



302 SHELLEY AND KEATS 

And walked with inward glory crowned — 
Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure. 
Others I see whom these surround — 
Smiling they live and call life pleasure ; 
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure. 

" Yet now despair itself is mild, 
Even as the winds and waters are ; 
I could lie down like a tired child, 
And weep away the life of care 
Which I have borne and yet must bear, 
Till death like sleep might steal on me, 
And I might feel in the warm air 
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea 
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony. 

" Some might lament that I were cold, 
As I, when this sweet day is gone, 
Which my lost heart, too soon grown old, 
Insults with this untimely moan ; 
They might lament — for I am one 
Whom men love not — and jet regret, 
Unlike this day, which, when the sun 
Shall on its stainless glory set, 
Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet." 

You need not be frightened by occasional passages in 
Shelle3 7 's poetry of denunciation of things you admire. 
No true Christian need fear to read Shelley. He did 
not denounce the spirit of Christianity, but excesses 
committed in the course of the history of the Church 
and its connection witli political creeds. 

Shelley died young, before be bad completed his 
thirtieth year ; but Keats, who was three years bis 
junior, died before him. The belief fixed in the public 
mind by Byron's line : 

" John Keats, who was cut off by one critique" — 

is only a half truth, if it is any portion of the truth at 
all. The disease to which he succumbed, pulmonary 
consumption, would probably have cut bim off at an 



CRITICISM OF KEATS 303 

early age, whatever the reception of his poetry had 
been. Unfriendly criticism at the utmost only hastened 
his end. Certainly the criticism was very savage. 
Keats suffered from the same accidents in the literary 
situation as Shelley ; he was a friend of Hunt's, and a 
Cockne}', and a rebel against the traditions of Pope, 
and these facts intensified the bitterness of the Quar- 
terly and Blackwood' 's. And his assailants had a taunt 
to level at him such as they could not use against the 
son of a baronet, connected by blood with some of the 
oldest noble families in England ; "Johnny " Keats, as 
J3lac/vivoocrs delighted to call him, had been a surgeon's 
apprentice, and was the son- of a livery-stable keeper. 
Keats had too much manliness in him to have been 
much affected by the truculence of his critics if he had 
been a self-satisfied poet. But the effect was aggra- 
vated not only by ill health and pecuniary embarrass- 
ments, but by his profound dissatisfaction with his own 
work. He said himself, and with every appearance of 
sincerity, that a sense of his shortcomings from the high 
ideal that he had set to himself gave him " pain without 
comparison beyond what Blackioood or the Quarterly 
could possibly inflict." " I have no cause to complain," 
he wrote. " I have no doubt that if I had written 
'Othello 'I should have been cheered. I shall go on 
with patience. . . I know nothing ; I have read 
nothing ; and I mean to follow Solomon's directions, 
'get learning, get understanding.' There is but one 
way for me. The road lies through application, study, 
and thought. I will pursue it." These were the words 
of a young man of a very different fibre from the 
affected, mawkish, puling sentimentalist pictured by 
.the critics of the time as the author of "Endymion." 
Keats had but a short lease of life before him when he 
wrote thus, but to the last he pursued earnestly his 
ideals of excellence, and the world has arrived at a 
very different measure of the worth of his performance 



304 SHELLEY AND KEATS 

from that formed by himself on his death-bed, when he 
told his friend Severn to put on his gravestone the 
inscription : " Here lies one whose name was writ in 
water." 

Keats is often coupled with Shelley as if they were 
poets of kindred genius. But the connection between 
them was purely accidental ; beyond a certain profusion 
and fluency and richness of imagery they had little in 
common, as little as any two poets of the same genera- 
tion. They both died young. They both died in Italy, 
and their monuments stand in the same cemetery at 
Rome. Both of them were cut off with much unful- 
filled promise of great things. When Shelley's body 
was recovered, a copy of Keats's "Endyniion" was 
found in his pocket. One of Shelley's few popular 
poems is the lament for Keats under the pastoral name 
of Adonais. These facts have associated the two poets 
in the general memory. But their aims in art were 
widely different. Keats had none of Shelley's fiery 
enthusiasm for humanity, and, although he had an ample 
share of the poet's peculiar gift of making new combi- 
nations, his combinations are more sensuous ; they have 
not the subtle intellectual flavor of Shelley's. A poet 
of high rank is always his own best critic, and just as 
Shelley most truly characterized himself when he said 
that " his power consisted in sympathy and that part 
of imagination which relates to sentiment and con- 
templation," so Keats most truly characterized himself 
when he said that his ruling principle was " a yearning 
passion for the beautiful." " I have loved the principle 
of beauty in all things," he wrote in his last days. I 
am inclined to think that Mr. Matthew Arnold, a critic 
with whose judgments I rarely find myself in dissent, 
makes a somewhat misleading remark when he insists 
that Keats's master passion was not the passion of the 
sensuous or sentimental poet, but was an intellectual or 
spiritual passion. If the words sensuous and sentimental 



PECULIARITY OF KEATS S POETRY 305 

were intended in an opprobrious sense, the remark 
might be useful ; but if they are used in the literal 
meaning, and then contrasted with intellectual and 
spiritual, their tendency is to withdraw the reader of 
Keats from the main characteristics of his poetry. The 
beauty that Keats pursued, whether or not we call that 
beauty " truth," was loveliness 

" In shape and hue and colour and sweet sound," — 

to use the words of Shelley in the " Adonais." I imagine 
that Mr. Arnold's intention in drawing the distinction 
that I have quoted was to lay stress on the fact that 
the loveliness on which Keats's heart was set was not a 
meretricious loveliness, but a loveliness that was great 
and noble and pure. Still it was a sensuous loveliness 
in this meaning, that more than any other poet he aimed 
at and succeeded in depicting in words the beauty that 
painters put on canvas and sculptors chisel in marble. 
It is peculiarly easy to trace the main external influences 
that moulded Keats's poetry, because all his work was 
done in youth, when the enthusiastic admirations of the 
artist are most marked in endeavors to emulate what 
he admires. And it is a marked peculiarity of Keats's 
poetry that its most vital moulding influences came not 
from the work of previous poets, but from the sister 
arts of painting and sculpture. Impassioned admiration 
of Greek sculpture gave a more potent turn to Keats's 
poetry than any other external influence. Byron recog- 
nized this when he spoke of him as having 

" without Greek 
Contrived to talk about the gods of late 
Much as they might have been supposed to speak." 

We see this influence not merely in his famous " Ode 
on a Grecian Urn," where he deliberately seeks to in- 
terpret in words what the artist had sought to design 
20 



306 SHELLEY AND KEATS 

in visible lines, but all through his poems — in " Endy- 
mion," in " Hyperion," in the " Eve of St. Agnes," in 
"Lamia," in "Isabella." If we wonder what the sur- 
geon's apprentice at Ealing could have known about 
Greek sculpture and ceramic art, we must remember 
that the Elgin Marbles were brought to this country 
and deposited at the British Museum when he was a 
boy. You know Byron's denunciation of the nobleman, 
with heart cold as the crags that guard his native coast, 
who had the shameless rapacity to plunder Athens of 
these masterpieces ; but, looking impartially at the act 
and its results, we recognize that they have had a much 
more vital and suggestive influence on the mind of 
Europe in London than they would liave had in Athens, 
and they have given us much of what is most precious 
in the poetry of Keats. One of Keats's friends was the 
painter Haydon, who records in his autobiograph} 7 the 
intoxicating effect produced on him by his first sight of 
Greek sculpture. " Endymion " and " Hyperion " make 
it certain that Keats shared his friend's enthusiasm. 
Let the meaning sink into the mind, and you will see a 
succession of pictures executed in the spirit of Greek 
plastic art. In "Endymion" Keats seems always to 
have had a succession of pictures and sculptures before 
his mind's eye, and his poetry seems to be the interpre- 
tation of the impression he receives. The opening of 
" Hyperion," — and also some of his other poems, such 
as the " Ode to the Nightingale " and " The Eve of 
St. Agnes," — is like the description of a statue, with the 
repose and stillness of Greek sculpture, which is not a 
dead stillness, but motion instantaneously arrested. 



SUPPLEMENT 



MR. COURTHOPE'S BIOGRAPHY OP POPE 

It is thirty-five years, as every reviewer has remarked, 
since the edition undertaken by John Wilson Croker 
and now completed by Mr. Courthope was announced ; 
but the real beginning of the work that Mr. Courthope 
brings to a close may be said to date from the papers by 
Mr. Dilke, of which that announcement was the text. 
Mr. Dilke's discovery of the Caryll letters may be said 
to have opened a new chapter in the history of Pope's 
reputation. By this lucky find, followed up with amaz- 
ing acuteness and patience, Mr. Dilke was able to clear 
up several incidents which had baffled all previous 
biographers ; and his success and the piquancy of his 
discoveries gave an immense stimulus to research into 
the obscure particulars of Pope's life and the obscure 
allusions in his poetry. Pope's marvellous intellectual 
activity and ingenuity, and his persistent habit of mysti- 
fication in every thing relating to himself, made his life 
and works the best possible field for the exercise of 
detective skill. By all this the edition now completed 
has profited. But for Mr. Dilke's researches, and the 
impulse they gave to investigation, it could never have 
been what it has become. Mr. El win, Mr. Courthope's 
predecessor, made the most ample acknowledgment of 
his debt to this enthusiastic volunteer from the outside ; 
and now one of the main interests of the biograph} r 
which it has fallen to Mr. Courthope to execute is to see 

307 



308 SUPPLEMENT 

how he views Pope's character under the fierce light that 
has been thrown upon it. The new biographer is in the 
position of a judge hearing an important case reopened 
after the discovery and production of a vast and intri- 
cate mass of fresh evidence. 

The importance of Mr. Courthope's decision is con- 
siderable. The completeness of the new edition must 
make it the standard for a good while to come, and the 
accompanying biography has thus a position of great 
advantage for influencing the general judgment of 
Pope's character. It is just as well that the biography 
should have been delayed till the disturbing effects of 
the new discoveries had passed away, and that the task 
of judicially weighing and summing up should have 
fallen to one whose judgment has not been biassed by 
the first shock of damaging revelations, and whose 
temper has not been exasperated by the worry of track- 
ing the man of many mysteries through the perplexing 
details of his subtle little plots and manoeuvres. It is 
just as well that Mr. Elwin's place was taken by Mr. 
Courthope before the stage of passing final judgment 
was reached. Mr. Elwin had great merits as a critic ; 
it would be most unjust not to acknowledge the excel- 
lence of his editorial work. He spared no pains in 
research ; he passed over no difficult}' ; and he took as 
much trouble to make his statements clear and concise 
as he did to make his information accurate. In his notes 
and introductions he gave a very fair and full represen- 
tation of the commentaries of previous authorities. His 
own judgments on critical points were, perhaps, too 
uniformly hostile and unsympathetic ; but they could 
never be accused of haste, and they were always backed 
by well-considered and clearly expressed reasons. Per- 
haps an unfair impression of his want of sympathy was 
given by his having to deal chiefly with Pope's earlier 
and more imperfect work ; when he did admire, as in 
the case of " The Rape of the Lock," he expressed his 



MR. COURTHOPE'S BIOGRAPHY OF POPE 309 

admiration ungrudgingly. But in all that concerned the 
moral character of his subject Mr. Ehvin wrote too much 
as a righteously indignant avenger, as one who had been 
disgusted by the discoveries of Pope's double-dealings, 
and whose anger had been kept alive by having to track 
his tortuous courses through so many perplexing circum- 
stances. Pope had endeavored to pass off a sophisti- 
cated correspondence as genuine, and the interests of 
truth demanded that the deception should be exposed. 
"I do not pretend to think," Mr. Ehvin said, "that 
genius is an extenuation of rascality ; " and it was as a 
rascal, a detected and discredited impostor, a gentleman 
who had stooped to the arts of a professional forger and 
swindler, that he pursued the poet through all his deal- 
ings with friends and enemies, publications and pub- 
lishers. Pope cannot protest his good-will to an ac- 
quaintance in the exaggerated fashion of his time without 
drawing down upon himself the comment : " At the age 
of twenty, when frankness usually preponderates, Pope 
already abounded in the ostentatious profession of senti- 
ments he did not entertain." In the same letter Pope 
professes indifference to fame— a not uncommon profes- 
sion, and one not often taken too seriously by the dis- 
cerning. " In spite of his boasted apathy," Mr. Ehvin 
comments, " there cannot be found in the annals of the 
irritable race a more anxious, jealous, intriguing candi- 
date for fame." And so on. One tires of it after a time, 
and begins to doubt whether it is generous, or even just, 
or at all proportioned to the offence. 

No doubt when an intriguer is found out, it is well 
to make an example of him pour encourage?- les autres. 
But Mr. Elwin carries it too far in the case of Pope. 
He strikes a note of excess, and a misleading note, when 
he speaks of Pope as " an intriguing candidate for 
fame." The intrigues in which Pope has been detected 
do not belong to the time when he can properly be said 
to have been a candidate for fame ; they were engaged 



310 SUPPLEMENT 

in long after his fame was established, partly to humili- 
ate his enemies, and partly to gain credit for a universal 
benevolence and lofty equanimity of soul which he did 
not possess. He gained his fame originally by honest 
means enough, purely on his merits, in spite of the 
considerable disadvantages of obscure parentage and 
unpopular religion. Rascality and swindling are not 
excused by genius ; deception is deception, and perfidy 
is perfidy. But what Mr. El win seemed to forget was 
that there are degrees of moral turpitude. One may 
hold this without incurring any suspicion of Jesuitical 
ethics. Our righteous indignation does not rise to the 
same height against all offences that may be put in the 
same general category. Falsehood is falsehood, but 
there are degrees. A man who tries to swindle the 
world out of its good opinion, to make people believe 
him full of " the unclouded effulgence of universal 
benevolence and particular fondness," with no motive 
but sheer vanity and inordinate love of applause, can- 
not without violence to common-sense be put on the 
same moral level with the professional forger. Nine 
people out of ten who read the full narrative of Pope's 
frauds are more disposed to laugh at the ingenuity and 
fatuity of his tricks than to denounce them in angry 
reprobation. They are inexcusable and disgraceful, but 
taken in all their circumstances, as incidents in the life 
of a man otherwise memorable, they are nearer pecca- 
dilloes than crimes. A year or two ago, in writing a 
short sketch of Pope's life for an encyclopaedia, I 
hazarded the opinion that, when all the new revelations 
of Pope's intriguing habits are fairly weighed, his 
character remains where Johnson left it, neither better 
nor worse. " In all this," Johnson remarks of one of 
Pope's manoeuvres about " The Dunciad," " there was 
petulance and malignity enough, but I cannot think it 
very criminal." The remark might be extended to 
most of the fresh instances of double-dealing. In judg- 



MR. COURTHOPe's BIOGRAPHY OF POPE 311 

ing of tliein it is well to bear in mind the maxim which 
the great moralist quoted as one "that cannot be 
denied," that " moral obliquity is made more or less 
excusable by the motives that produce it." It is satis- 
factory to find that Mr. Courthope approaches Pope in 
the spirit of Johnson rather than of Mr. Elwin. 

Mr. Courthope does not try to extenuate or explain 
away Pope's moral delinquencies, but to put them in 
their proper place as parts of a very complex character. 
The result is that he brings us back to a judgment of 
Pope's moral character not substantially different from 
Johnson's. The space occupied by Mr. Dilke and Mr. 
Elwin in tracing with so much acumen the poet's 
mysterious ways, and the startling character of their 
revelations, have overloaded one side of the portrait, 
and Mr. Courthope has been at pains to restore the right 
proportion. His judicial deliverance will carry none the 
less weight that all the time he is adducing extenuating 
circumstances he protests that he has no intention of 
excusing or extenuating Pope's misdoings, and that 
" from the moralist's point of view the case must go 
undefended." The apparent inconsistency is only 
superficial ; it is merely a nice question of naming. 
Mr. Courthope is quite right to say that he does not 
excuse or extenuate or defend from a moral point of 
view, if he thinks that the use of such expressions 
would imply that we ought to approve in Pope's case of 
conduct mean and contemptible in itself and unworthy 
of his fame. We need not quarrel about words, if a 
biographer observes just proportions in his general 
estimate of the man's moral nature as a whole, and if 
he allows due weight to considerations that prevent 
us from classing Pope morally with "professional 
swindlers" and "'dirty animals' like Joseph Surface." 
This Mr. Courthope does with great ability and fair- 
ness. Throughout the biography he gives prominence 
to the ideal and magnanimous strain in Pope's character 



312 SUPPLEMENT 

as shown both in his private life and in his writings. 
Since the recent discoveries were made, Johnson has 
often been laughed at for speaking of " the perpetual 
and unclouded effulgence of universal benevolence and 
particular fondness " that shines out in Pope's letters. 
It has been assumed that all this was mere hypocrisy 
and pretence, because some of it was put in when he 
revised and redirected his correspondence, and that 
there was no such element as benevolence in the malign 
little poet's disposition. Mr. Courthope corrects this. 
His narrative gives fair prominence to the instances of 
kindly generosity to dependents and affectionate attach- 
ment to friends with which Pope's life abounds. The 
new letters in the correspondence, the letters that were 
not prepared for the public eye, ai'e not all to Pope's 
discredit. Though he did alienate Bolingbroke by an 
inexplicable trick, — it was, after all, a little trick, — he 
kept the love of most of his friends, and Arbuthnot, a 
shrewd judge of men, credited him with "a noble dis- 
dain and abhorrence of vice." And whatever casuistry 
may be applied to the incidents of his life, it is not to 
be denied that the moral standard of his Satires as a 
whole is high. His praise of the Man of Ross, of 
Bathurst, of Allen, and of Barnard the Quaker must 
be set over against Sappho and Atossa, Sporus and 
Atticus ; there is no good reason to sujapose that his 
admiration of the one was less sincere than his hatred 
of the other. Mr. Courthope seems to me to fairly 
establish his contention that Pope was naturally of 
an ardent, generous, and romantic temper, and that this 
strain was never wholly lost amid the bitter quarrels 
in which his later life was involved. 

A generous warmth of temperament, craving for 
affection as well as admiration, craving for both in- 
tensely as necessities of a very fragile constitution, and 
apt to intemperate vindictiveness when they were with- 
held — this was the basis of Pope's nature. His moral 



MR. COURTHOPe's BIOGRAPHY OF POPE 313 

delinquencies are not put in a fair light unless they are 
viewed as the defects of such a temperament, launched 
out of a quiet, secluded, bookish youth into a world of 
roughly intriguing cliques and factions, "literature," as 
Mr. Mark Pattison happily puts it, " a mere arena of 
partisan warfare," and " the public barbarized by the 
gladiatorial spectacle of politics." It was in this school 
that Pope acquired his habit of plotting and double- 
dealing. Mr. Courthope suggests that he may have 
owed the habit to his Roman Catholic training. Equivo- 
cation was regarded by them as an excusable weapon 
against penal laws, and what is allowed in particular 
cases may easily be extended till it becomes a general 
rule of life. It may well be that Pope was helped by 
the casuistry of his Church in justifying his crooked 
ways to his own conscience. There is a trace of this 
self-deception in the words of his letter to Martha 
Blount : " I have not told a lie (which we both abom- 
inate), but I think I have equivocated pretty genteelly." 
But, in truth, Pope did not need to go to his persecuted 
co-religionists for lessons in the art of genteel equivoca- 
tion or hardier forms of duplicity. His political friends, 
— and every man about town was then a politician, — 
Jacobite and Hanoverian alike, were as accomplished in 
the art and as unscrupulous in the practice of it as any 
Roman Catholic priest. It was a fierce struggle for ex- 
istence in the political world when the succession was 
uncertain and the throne insecure, and straightforward 
morality was not in fashion. Statesmen were fighting 
with life and all that made it worth having in peril, and 
were ready to use any means to win, whether of force or 
fraud. It is really by their intellectual qualities, their 
ingenuity, their far-reaching subtlety, their niceness of 
calculation, that Pope's intrigues are distinguished — 
their intellectual qualities and the pettiness of their 
objects. We must regard them as an imitation in his 
own private concerns of the games for larger stakes that 



314 SUPPLEMENT 

were going on round him in the political field. There 
can be no doubt that Pope had great natural gifts for 
intrigue, and that he took to it with great relish. The 
pleasure of the sport, the employment that it offered to 
his restless ingenuity, blinded him to its immorality, and 
the passion grew upon him till he could do nothing 
directly, but " played the politician about cabbages and 
turnips." The fact that a straight line is the shortest 
distance between two points was with him a reason for 
not taking it. It is impossible even now to follow him 
through the steps of any of the intricate plots which 
recent enquiry has unravelled with such patience without 
some emotions of sympathy with the artist's delight in 
his contrivances, so ingenious were they, and out of all 
proportion to the advantage to be gained. Ingenuity, 
of course, is no palliation of fraud ; but the amount of 
our indignation cannot but be affected by the impostor's 
motives, and the theoiy that finds in Pope's tortuous 
conduct nothing but mean and cowardly hypocrisy is 
simply imperfect analysis. This is just as indiscriminate 
as it is to find the animating spirit of his Satires in arro- 
gant malignity and cruelt}^. Mr. Courthope does good 
service in his chapter on " The War With the Dunces " 
in tracing the history of the quarrel, and showing that 
the most shady transactions of Pope's later years were 
really incidents in a protracted war in which he was not 
the original aggressor. Not to have struck the first 
blow in a quarrel which he conducted with so many dis- 
creditable artifices and such relentless cruelty is not, 
perhaps, much to boast of. But wanton malignity is 
undoubtedly a less respectable motive than vindictive- 
ness, if we are to admit degrees of wickedness and of 
moral reprobation ; and it is something to have it estab- 
lished by a careful judicial examination that Pope was 
vindictive rather than malignant. 

As a clear, well-arranged, and well-divided narrative 
of Pope's life, pervaded by a moderate and judicial es- 



MR. COURTHOPE S BIOGRAPHY OF POPE 315 

timate of liis character, Mr. Courtliope's biography is 
admirable. But his large and massive method of han- 
dling, which yields such excellent results in the con- 
densed narrative of intricate events and the judicial 
summing up of the complicated cases of conscience, is 
seen to want flexibility and precision when applied to 
such a many-sided question as Pope's place in litera- 
ture. Perspicuity of manner is gained at the expense 
of exactness of substance. Mr. Courthope, indeed, 
places Pope, with every appearance of exactness, with 
a bold geometrical simplicity, just at the point Avhere 
lines representing Medievalism and the Classical Re- 
vival intersect ; but he is not so successful in his at- 
tempts to justify this simple diagram as corresponding 
to historical facts. 

The defects of the massive method of handling are 
that it involves the omission of connecting links, and 
the assumption of large and definite masses common to 
the understanding of writer and reader. If the latter 
condition does not exist, the writer is tempted to take it 
for granted, and to refer to periods and tendencies on 
the large scale as if their characters were matters of 
clear and common knowledge, or at least established ac- 
ceptation among critics. The result is that statements 
severally distinct, confident, and sonorous give rise to a 
good deal of trouble when we try to reduce them to 
consistency for ourselves, or when the writer undertakes 
the office for us, and attempts to supply the links of 
connection. Thus Mr. Courthope opens his biography 
by presenting the date of Pope's birth as a time of 
unsettlement and confusion, distracted by "opposing 
forces, Catholic and Protestant, Whig and Tory, Aris- 
totelian and Baconian, Medievalist and' Classicist." 
Having thus boldly described the situation, he passes 
at once to his hero as " the poet who learned to har- 
monize all those conflicting principles in a form of ver- 
sification so clear and precise that for fully a hundred 



316 SUPPLEMENT 

years after he began to write it was accepted as the 
established standard of metrical music." It is a mas- 
terful and imposing introduction, but when the dazzled 
mind recovers, and asks in what sense Pope can be said 
to have harmonized Catholicism and Protestantism, 
Whiggism and Toryism, Aristotelianism and Baconi- 
anism, Medievalism and Classicism, it is not so easy to 
find a clear answer. It is right to say at once in fair- 
ness to Mr. Courthope that this is on\y the opening 
statement of his thesis, and that he does afterward at- 
tempt, partly at least, to make it good, and enable us 
to follow him intelligently in his bold transition from 
the general character of the time to the personality of 
Pope and the distinctive character of his work. But it 
is right also to say — and it illustrates the defects of the 
massive manner — that the reader would go very far 
astray who should take in its most obvious and literal 
sense Pope's harmonizing of these mighty opposites. 
To see how Pope harmonized Catholicism and Protest 
tantism one's first impulse would be to turn to the " Essay 
on Man "; but it cannot be there that the harmonization 
of which Mr. Courthope thinks is effected, for he calls 
it — not altogether justly — " a farrago of fallacies." 
So with Whiggism and Toryism. We recall the lines : 

" For forms of government let fools contest, 
Wliate'er is best administered is best." 

This cannot be the reconciliation spoken of, calling both 
parties equally fools. The truth, of course, is — if I 
rightly understand Mr. Courthope — that he uses the 
words Whiggism and Toryism, Protestantism and 
Catholicism, etc., in a subtle sense to signify a certain 
indefinite central idea or animating principle. The 
reader who wishes to penetrate to his meaning must 
tackle two very perplexing chapters, one on the " Essay 
on Criticism," and a second on Pope's place in English 
Literature, where the same topic is resumed. 



MR. COURTIIOPE S BIOGRAPHY OF POPE 31 V 

These chapters are the least satisfactory part of the 
book. Perhaps it is that Mr. Courthope has tried to 
crowd too much into too little space. Seeing that he 
attempts to formulate the leading changes in the princi- 
ples of poetic creation from Aristotle to Wordsworth, 
with the " Essay on Criticism " as a central and turn- 
ing point, this is likely enough. Perhaps it is that his 
ideas took shape as he wrote, and that while he con- 
tinued to make large and definite statements, they were 
not originally so cast as to show their coherency. At 
any rate the result is perplexing enough. Mr. Court- 
hope at the end of the last chapter formulates certain 
conclusions about Pope's place in literature that one can 
at least understand, however much one may differ from 
some of them ; but the discussion through which he 
reaches them is much less plain sailing, and it is not easy 
to follow the connection between some of the theories 
advanced in the course of it and the propositions to 
which we are finally conducted. Further, though the 
drift of the argument, so far as I can make it out, is 
paradoxical, it proceeds often by statements which are 
among the commonplaces of criticism, at least in words, 
and give it an air of plausibility till we see that it com- 
pels us, if we accept it as sound, to give them a special 
interpretation. The discussion would have been less 
intricate if Mr. Courthope had tried to establish Pope's 
position inductively by an examination of his poetry and 
a comparison of it witli what came before and after. It 
is, however, by way of abstract discussion of his critical 
principles as laid down in the Essay that he proceeds, 
and thus we are involved in a bewildering series of defi- 
nitions of what is meant by Nature, Wit, True Wit and 
False Wit, Mediaeval Methods, and Classical Methods and 
Modern Methods. Finally, although the gist of the 
argument seems to be that the central artistic principle 
of Pope and his school is the " direct imitation of 
Nature," and that the Essay, in virtue of its distinct 



318 SUPPLEMENT 

enunciation of this principle, occupies a more important 
position in literature than is commonly assigned to it, I 
have searched in vain for any attempt to define what 
is meant by that very familiar but not very tangible 
phrase " imitation of Nature." At least as much turns 
upon the meaning of that as on the meaning of Nature, 
and the conceptions of Nature prevalent at different 
times. But I will try to disengage his main positions, 
and examine what they seem to me to imply. 

The starting-point of Mr. Courthope's dialectic, which 
has no lack of freshness and vigor, if it is somewhat 
intricate, is the " Essay on Criticism," the place to be 
assigned to it in literature, and Mr. Leslie Stephen's dis- 
paraging description of it as a " coining of aphorisms 
out of commonplace." This Mr. Courthope challenges, 
and maintains, in effect, that its critical principles were 
not commonplace to Pope's own generation, but that, on 
the contrary, when the Essay is taken in relation to the 
course of literature from Aristotle down through the 
Middle Ages to the time of Queen Anne, it is seen to 
mark an epoch. And the main significance of this 
epoch is, as I understand Mr. Courthope, the return after 
a long interval to a conception of the relations between 
Nature and Art identical with Aristotle's. According 
to Aristotle, poetry is a "direct imitation of Nature" ; 
and Pope brought Poetry back from Medievalism to 
this conception when he counselled poets to 

" First follow Nature, and your judgment frame 
By her just standard, which is still the same." 

Mr. Stephen saj^s that "Follow Nature" is a maxim 
"common to all generations of critics." Against this 
Mr. Courthope develops a theory of the essence of 
Medievalism as consisting in the imposition of subjec- 
tive and metapl^sical conceptions on Nature, and con- 
tends that the significance of Pope's advice was the 
clear and definite repudiation of this practice ; that 



MR. COURTIIOPE S BIOGRAPHY OF POPE 319 

Pope in effect said : " Imitate Nature directly," and that 
this is the distinctive feature in his critical principles. 
He even seems to hold that it was in this that Pope's 
much discussed " correctness " consisted, and not in 
stricter attention to the rules of metre and grammar 
and rhetoric. 

All this is comparatively simple, whether or not we 
agree with it. Perplexity ai'ises when we begin to ask 
wherein Pope's adherence to the standard of Nature 
distinguishes him from our great poets before him and 
our great poets after him. We understand at once that 
Mr. Courthope's doctrine is opposed to the common 
habit in our century of speaking of Pope's poetry as 
"artificial." So far I am, for one, in complete sympathy 
with him. But does he mean that Pope was the first, 
poet in our literature to set up the just standard of 
Nature ? His exposition here and there would seem 
to imply this, as well as the large importance that he 
claims for the Essay ; but he expressly says that this is 
not his meaning. He expressly mentions Chaucer and 
Shakespeare among the poets who have imitated Nat- 
ure directly. But if this direct imitation of Nature is 
the distinctive feature of Pope's principles, and the 
ground on which his school is called " classical," why 
are not Chaucer and Shakespeare also called " classi- 
cal"? When we ask this, we find ourselves not far 
off from Mr. Stephen's position that the following of 
Nature is a common maxim. Mr. Courthope's paradox 
would seem, then, only to amount to saying that great 
poets are all of one school. What, then, was distinctive 
in Pope's following of Nature ? 

Mr. Courthope would answer this, in effect, by sa} r ing 
that in Pope's mind Nature was opposed to the " false 
wit," the metaphors, conceits, fantastic allusions, and 
mystic symbolism of what Johnson called the " Meta- 
physical School" of the seventeenth century — Donne 
and Cowley, and the earlier work of Dryden. If 



320 SUPPLEMENT 

he had not gone beyond this, and his serviceable 
illustration of the European prevalence of this false wit 
for more than a century, every-body would have under- 
stood him and agreed with him. It is tolerably obvious 
that abstinence from false wit in this sense is one of the 
items of Pope's correctness ; he expressly particularizes 
it himself. Whether or not it is warrantable to describe 
Pope's method generally as a reaction against this false 
wit, as if it constituted the whole of his correctness, is 
another question. But Mr. Courthope does not stop 
here. He goes on to connect false wit with Medieval- 
ism generally, the subtleties of Scholastic Philosophy, 
Thomas Aquinas, the Provencal poets, Dante and 
Petrarch, and the allegorical and symbolical presenta- 
tion of Nature. Here again we admit the connection ; 
any body would ; there is an obvious affinity between 
the keen, far-reaching, beautifully ingenious analogies 
of Donne and the analytic triumphs of the Schoolmen, 
of whom, indeed, Donne was at one time a close student. 
We admit the connection ; but we pause when we are 
ashed to jump from this admission to the conclusion 
that Pope's lines : 

" True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, 
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed " — 

were a formal renunciation not merely of the conceits 
of the poetry of the seventeeth century, but of Medie- 
valism generally, as false wit, and a return to Aristotle 
and the standard of Nature. 

It certainly is a most ingenious argument. If Mr. 
Courthope may claim to rank with Johnson as a judge 
of Pope's morality, he may equally claim to rank with 
Warburton as an interpreter of Pope's meaning. His 
interpretation of Pope's Classicism as opposed to Medie- 
valism carries with it the relation of the Essay to 
Whiggism and Toryism, Protestantism and Catholicism, 
Baconianism and Aristotelianism. Up to the time of 



MR. CQURTHOPE's BIOGRAPHY OF POPE 321 

the Revolution, which seated a Protestant on the throne, 
the Court had a leaning to Catholicism, and thereby 
encouraged Medievalism, and the Tories were the party 
:>f the Court. Thus, although Pope himself was a 
Catholic and a personal friend of the leading Tories, the 
" Essay on Criticism," in virtue of its protest against 
Medievalism in poetry, falls into line with the anti- 
medieval spirit of Whiggism and Protestantism. By 
Aristotelianism as opposed to Baconianism Mr. Court- 
hope must mean the philosophy of Aristotle as devel- 
oped by the Schoolmen, for it is part of his theory that 
Pope used the word Nature in the same sense as Bacon, 
and consequently in the same sense as Aristotle. One 
is still left wondering what exactly he meant by saying 
that Pope " harmonized " all those opposing forces, see- 
ing that the Essay is held to have signalized the final 
triumph of one class of them. But it is a most inge- 
nious theory, certainly " witty " according to the defini- 
tion of wit that Mr. Courthope quotes from Locke, 
whether we are to reckon it as true wit or the opposite. 
Mr. Courthope's theory about the place of Pope's 
" Essay on Criticism " is so far sound that it maintains, 
in a very abstract and metaphysical manner, the toler- 
ably plain fact that the Essay was part of the general 
and gradual emancipation of the English mind from 
mediaeval habits of thought. Beyond this he does not 
seem to me to establish his case. Pope got less than 
his deserts from the critics of the last two generations : 
the fashion of taste had gone against him ; but we 
should go as far wrong in the opposite direction if we 
argued that the advent of Pope in poetry was an event 
comparable to the advent of Newton in physical science, 
or to the advent of Locke in philosophy. Even if we 
admit that "True wit is Nature to advantage dressed" 
did mean in Pope's mind " True poetry is Nature 
directly imitated," how can a method which Pope had 
in common with Chaucer and Shakespeare, Ariosto and 
21 



322 SUPPLEMENT 

Cervantes, be said to be so distinctive of a school as to 
warrant the title of " classical " ? Personally I do not 
think that the differentia of the so-called "classical" 
school is to be found in formal critical principles ; is 
seems to me to lie rather, as I have indicated before in 
this magazine, in unconscious habits of expression. It 
has obtained the name " classical" on more superficial 
grounds, namety, that translations of Latin and Greek 
masterpieces and imitations of leading classical forms 
were among its most conspicuous productions, and that 
its critics, in the earlier period of the school, professed 
great deference for the ancient authorities. Certainly 
directness cannot be said to have been a prominent 
feature of its imitations of Nature, if direct imitation is 
the opposite of allusive, allegorical, and abstract presen- 
tation. We may pass "The Rape of the Lock" as 
direct, if we get a definition of Nature that includes 
sylphs and gnomes ; but what shall we say of " The 
Dunciad " ? And what shall we say of the countless 
odes to and descriptions of personified Seasons, Passions, 
Institutions, Conditions, Faculties, which held the field 
till the last }^ears of the century? These were at least 
as much indirect imitations as the " Roman de la Rose," 
the great mediaeval example of allegory, and yet they 
form the bulk of the work of the " classical " school. 

Mr. Courthope has not proved his paradox about 
Pope's relation to his predecessors, and he makes out a 
still less plausible case for a still bolder paradox about 
Pope's relation to Wordsworth. There is such a refresh- 
ing novelty about a theory which upholds Pope as dis- 
tinctively the poet of Nature, and Wordsworth ns a 
reactionary ally of "false wit," that one could wish it 
were not so manifestly strained and perverse. It is to 
be regretted, too, for another reason, that just as there is 
justice in Mr. Courthope's defence of Pope against the 
charge of being peculiarly artificial, he does lay stress 
upon a feature in Wordsworth's theory of poetry that 



MR. COURTHOPE'S BIOGRAPHY OF POPE 323 

is very often overlooked. Wordsworth, though he is 
commonly called the poet of Nature, claims supremacy 
for the imagination in poetic work : 

" Imagination needs must stir. . . 
Minds that have nothing to confer 
Find little to perceive." 

Coleridge says the same thing in the familiar lines : 

" Dear Lady, we receive but what we give, 
And in our life alone does Nature live." 

There is no antagonism between this and adherence 
to the just standard of Nature, unless Nature is taken 
in a very limited sense ; but it gives Mr. Courthope an 
opening for connecting the modern poets with the false 
wits whom Pope superseded, and developing and point- 
ing against them a new interpretation of the line : 

" What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." 

"Pope, the antagonist of the metaphysical school, had taught 
that the essence of poetry was the presentation in a perfect form, 
of imaginative materials common to the poet and the reader : 

' "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.' 

Wordsworth maintained, on the contrary, that matter not in itself 
stimulating to the general imagination might become a proper 
subject for poetry if glorified by the imagination of the poet. 
There is an obvious analogy between this method of composition 
and the wit, or discordia concors, which was the aim of the seven- 
teenth-century poet." 

This would have been true enough if it had been part 
of Wordsworth's theory that a poet's imagination may 
give poetic value to any thing, — a broomstick, for in- 
stance, — irrespective of the ordinary laws of feeling. It 
is only by taking this as Wordsworth's meaning that 
Mr. Courthope is able to give a semblance of plausibility 
to his case, and, starting with a little misunderstanding, 



324 SUPPLEMENT 

he goes on to enlarge this till we find him taking it as a 
condition of poetic work on Wordsworth's theory that 
the poet should "burn the bridge of connection between 
himself and his readers"; that is, should consult only 
his own feelings, and pay no regard to the manner in 
which other men think and feel. In answer to this it is 
sufficient to point out that the opposite of this is repeat- 
edly asserted to be a poet's duty in the Preface to the 
" Lyrical Ballads," a document to which Mr. Courthope 
refers as an "animated rhetorical treatise," but which, 
judging from his extraordinary perversions of its lead- 
ing doctrines, he cannot have studied very attentively. 
How can he reconcile the following extract from the 
Preface with what he sa3 r s of Wordsworth's theory : 

" The Poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater 
promptness to think and feel without immediate external excite- 
ment, a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as 
are produced in him in that manner. But these passions and 
thoughts and feelings are the general j>assions and thoughts and feel- 
ings of men. " 

The truth is that Wordsworth's quarrel with artificial 
poetic diction was that it was not intelligible to men in 
general as the appropriate expression of the feelings de- 
scribed. "The poet thinks and feels," he said, "in the 
spirit of human passions. How, then, can his language 
differ from that of all other men who feel vividly and 
see clearly ? " Wordsworth was very far indeed from 
ignoring, even in theory, the need of "imaginative ma- 
terials common to the poet and the reader," and he was 
fully alive to the danger of yielding to what he called 
" particular associations " as distinguished from such as 
were general ; but, as he explains, he was obliged to 
trust his own judgment as to what would be intelligible 
to his readers. What other judgment than his own 
would Mr. Courthope suggest for the poet's guidance? 
How can the poet reach the common heart or the com- 



MR. COURTHOPE'S BIOGRAPHY OF POPE 325 

mon mind except through his own heart and mind ? 
"Where else can he find his imaginative materials? But 
it is not easy to make out what function Mr. Courthope 
assigns to the imagination in poetry. " In every great 
epic or dramatic poem," he says, " the action or fable, in 
every great lyric poem the passion, is not imagined and 
discovered by the poet, but [what is the point of the 
antithesis?] is shared by the poet with his audience ; 
the element contributed by a poet singly is the concep- 
tion and form of the poem." " The imaginative mate- 
rials are common to the poet and the audience." Mr. 
Courthope seems to mean that unless a poet chooses sub- 
jects — fables, situations, characters, passions — that are 
easily and widely intelligible, and intrinsically interest- 
ing, he must be content with a limited audience. But 
why should this be said in words which appear to deny 
the creative character of the imagination, as if Shakes- 
peare had not " imagined " the passion of Hamlet and 
Othello, or Milton had not "imagined" the bearing, the 
despair, and the defiant hatred of his rebel angels in the 
fiery pit ? 

On his title-page Mr. Courtney quotes the saying of 
Horace: " Difficile est propria communia dicere." It is 
difficult ; but one often feels in reading his critical chap- 
ters that he has succeeded. One could wish that his 
exposition of his paradoxes had been as successful as his 
disguise of his endoxes, for it is a gallant and vigorous 
attempt to give new life to an old controversy. 



II 

THE SUPPOSED TYRANNY OF POPE 

There is one notable change in Pope's position since 
the last centenary of his birth. His manner is now old 
enough to bear revival. A clever writer of epigram- 
matic couplets, with something much less exquisite than 
Pope's mastery of his favorite stave, and much less 
strong and keen than his wit, — a passably clever imitator 
in short, — would be certain now of a wide and cordial 
welcome. Of course a certain discretion would have to 
be shown in the line of imitation ; not all the master's 
subjects would serve equally well for the modern dis- 
ciple. We should probably find little to admire in a 
new " Windsor Forest " ; even a new " Essay on Man," 
with all our recent modern developments in philosophy 
and religion thrown in, might not attract as wide a circle 
of readers as " Robert Elsmere " ; but it may safely be 
said tliat the time is ripe for new " Imitations of Horace " 
if only the man were ready. As for a new " Dunciad," 
that is a more delicate subject to hint at, as nobody 
knows what might happen, and it would not be a com- 
fortable experience to be hitched into the rhyme if the 
new satirist had as sharp a tooth as his great original. 
It is better to let sleeping cynics lie. But certainly it is 
a wonder that in these days of " New " things, New 
Lucians, New Republics, New Plutarchs, and so forth, 
nobody should have essayed to give us a New Dunciad. 
Is it that in this age of universal cleverness we have no 
Dunces, or that Pope's form is not quite so easy to 
imitate as it was the fashion fifty years ago to say ? Or 
is it that we are all so very good-natured that the " airy 

326 



THE SUPPOSED TYRANNY OF POPE 327 

malevolence " of the great satirist would not be 
tolerated ? 

This much at least is certain, that if we had material, 
and a satirist, and if our satirist were dexterous enough 
to evade the law of libel, — another barrier to the imitator 
of Pope, — the form of epigrammatic couplets would now 
have all the charm of novelty, whereas a hundred years 
ago the public ear was tired of them. From the first of 
these propositions we imagine there will be no dissent ; 
but as regards the second a very general impression to 
the contrary prevails. In spite of the labors of such 
accurate historians of literature as the late Mr. Mark 
Pattison and Mr. Stopford Brooke, Pope's relations to 
the poetry of the latter half of the eighteenth century 
are still very generally misunderstood. If the average 
educated man, with some knowledge of the broad out- 
lines of literary history but no special interest in its 
details, were asked, as a question pertinent to the recent 
celebration, what would have been the probable recep- 
tion of a poem in Pope's manner when last his centenary 
came round, he would probably answer out of a vague 
impression that in the year 1788 a poem in any other 
manner would have been promptly extinguished by the 
critics. The general notion is that the authority of 
Pope was supreme throughout the eighteenth century, 
and that it remained unshaken till the advent of the new 
potentates, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and Byron. 
It is supposed that the public taste was so devoted to Pope 
and what is called the " classical school" that no depart- 
ure from its principles of composition would have been 
received with patience ; that even Milton and the great 
Elizabethans were decried and neglected ; and that long 
and determined efforts were needed before the public 
could be brought back to a higher standard of poetic 
excellence. This, indeed, is commonly given as the ex- 
planation of the utter decay of poetry in the eighteenth 
century, that people lived in slavish subjection to narrow 



328 SUPPLEMENT 

and exclusive rules of art ; that all who felt an impulse 
to write in verse were intimidated into taking artificial 
standards as their guide rather than Nature ; that genius 
was stifled by timid and laborious endeavor after cor- 
rectness. And Pope's name was the bugbear used to 
frighten unruly genius into submission. 

Such was the view of the poetry of the eighteenth 
century proclaimed with authority some fifty years ago, 
and still, after a good many years of sober contradiction, 
very extensively held. An opinion backed by the con- 
fident and brilliant rhetoric of Macaulay is not easily 
dislodged. The reaction against the critical school 
that set in with the great poetic expansion at the be- 
ginning of this century was definitely established bj r 
Macaulay's article on Moore's " Life of Byron " in the 
Edinburgh Review. It gave articulate expression to 
the effect produced on the public mind by the destruc- 
tive criticism of which Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 
Bowles were the leading exponents. Their tone, of 
course, was much more judicial, but since they laid 
stress on the defects of Pope, and the public had been 
accustomed for two or three generations to hear chiefly 
of his merits, the general impression produced was that 
his poetry was essentially and radically vicious, that he 
was, as it were, an impostor who had long deceived the 
people, but had been detected and exposed at last. 
This exaggerated condemnation was not the fault of 
the new critics, but it was the natural result of their 
saying what they said at the time when they said it. 
That happened in Pope's case which happens in the 
progress of all conceptions toward exact qualification. 
Thinking on any subject is generally done by halves or 
by bits, each of which as it comes into prominence fills 
the area of the whole truth. As long as the public 
mind was dazzled bj r certain splendid qualities in Pope's 
verse, these qualities virtually represented the sum of 
poetic excellence ; he was simply a poet ; there was no 



THE SUPPOSED TYRANNY OF POPE 329 

question of defects or limitations. There came a time 
when the defects were loudly insisted upon, and the public 
mind was occupied in the same exclusive manner with 
poetic excellence of a different type which had yet 
to undergo its process of qualification. Pope was then 
simply no poet ; he was the complete antithesis of 
poetic excellence. Pope's reputation followed the 
ordinary law in passing through those two violent 
stages on its way toward a more fixed and definite 
formation ; it may safely be said to have now reached 
a further stage in which merits and defects are no 
longer in mutually destructive antagonism, and Pope 
is recognized as a great poet, to be admired, enjoyed, 
and studied for what he was, without being despised 
or neglected for what he was not. 

We speak of the conception of Pope's poetry in that 
vague but none the less real receptacle of ideas, the 
general mind, to the fluctuations and advances of which 
it is not easy to obtain a definite index. Perhaps one 
of the most satisfactory gauges of public opinion, 
whether of men or of measures, is to be found in the 
attitude of moderate critics. If modern critics are apolo- 
getic and conciliatory in hinting at blemishes, the man 
or the measure, we may be sure, stands high in public 
estimation. In the case of Pope we find that in the 
eighteenth century, before his poetry had passed through 
the crucible of the Wordsworthian school, such a 
moderate critic as Joseph Warton had to be cautious in 
pointing out Pope's limitations ; whereas thirty years 
ago such a temperate admirer as Mr. Carruthers had to 
guard himself carefully against the charge of putting 
Pope's merits too high. More recently Mr. Elwin's 
elaborate criticism of Pope has been received with 
some impatience on account of its hostile and unsym- 
pathetic tone ; and the remarks made about him within 
the last two months have shown a disposition to make 
amends for the violence of previous disparagement. 



330 SUPPLEMENT 

While there has been this oscillation concerning 
Pope's merits in the general mind, following in its own 
way the movements of critical dialectic, there has been 
comparatively little substantial difference of opinion 
among the few who, in Wordsworth's language, make 
"a serious study of poetry." Although critics of the 
Wordsworth ian school discredited Pope so much that 
it became among their more foolish adherents a mark 
of corrupt taste to find a word to say in favor of any 
thing written in the eighteenth century, the leaders 
themselves, especially Coleridge and Bowles, were by 
no means insensible to Pope's unrivalled brilliancy 
within his own limits. On the other hand, it is a mis- 
take to suppose that the critics of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, even in the generation immediately after Pope's 
own, were unconscious of those limits, although they 
had more complete sympathy with the poet's merits 
and were more ungrudging in their praise. Too many 
of us still see even the criticism of the eighteenth cen- 
tury through the spectacles of reactionaries who were in 
too violent a heat to see clearly. The admiration of Pope 
was not an unqualified and unreasoning idolatry among 
the critics of the eighteenth century. Even Bowles's 
main contention, over which there was so much discus- 
sion at the beginning of this century, that satiric and 
ethic poetry are necessarily from their subject-matter 
inferior species, and cannot entitle a poet to the first 
rank however masterly in execution, was put forward 
in substance by Joseph Warton as early as 1756. It 
was put forward in substance, though with a slight 
difference, Warton's exact position being that wit and 
satire are transitory and perishable, while nature and 
passion are eternal. And ten years earlier this same 
ambitious youth, having just taken his degree at Oxford, 
issued a volume of odes, in the preface to which he 
expressed a modest hope that they " would be looked 
upon as an attempt to bring poetry back into its right 



THE SUPPOSED TYRANNY OF POPE 331 

channel,'' his opinion being that "invention and imagi- 
nation are the chief faculties of a poet," and that " the 
fashion of moralizing in verse had been carried too far." 
This was in 1746, within three years of Pope's death, 
and the bold venture was so far successful that a second 
edition was at once called for. Tke Odes of Warton's 
school-fellow and friend, Collins, who wrote in the 
same independent spirit, but with infinitely greater 
genius, were published at the same time ; they had, 
indeed, intended at first to publish together. The 
poetry of Collins was of a much less simple, common- 
place, and popular cast, and his volume of Odes re- 
mained unsold ; but it opened the door to an intimacy 
with Thomson and Johnson, an evidence that such 
critical authorities were far from being disposed to 
stifle genius that did not accommodate itself to the 
manner of Pope. But it may be said that Warton's 
free criticism of Pope was only an impotent heresy, 
an individual eccentricity serving only to make more 
marked the general drift of opinion. Was it not the 
case that he kept back the second part of his essay for 
more than a quarter of a century and that Johnson 
supposed the reason for this to be " disappointment at 
not having been able to persuade the world to be of his 
opinion as to Pope"? Yes: but the "opinion" to 
which Johnson referred was the opinion that Pope's 
reputation in the future would rest upon his " Windsor 
Forest," his "Eloisa to Abelard," and his "Rape of the 
Lock," rather than upon his moral and satirical poems. 
Of Warton's essay itself — or rather of the first part, for 
the second part was not published till a year or two 
before his death — the great critic repeatedly wrote and 
spoke in terms of the highest praise. It was this essay 
that he described as " a book which teaches how the 
brow of Criticism may be smoothed, and how she may 
be enabled, with all her severity, to attract and delight." 
No man was ever less disposed than Johnson to sup- 



332 SUPPLEMENT 

press independent criticism, however paradoxical this 
may seem to those who have been taught to regard him 
as the inflexible administrator of narrow and arbitrary- 
critical laws. He was punctiliously conscientious in 
always giving a reason for his critical decisions. Lord 
Mansfield's famous ^advice to the judge who knew no 
law would have been abhorrent to one who prided him- 
self on his knowledge of critical law, and who held that 
all critical laws worthy of respect were founded in 
reason. " Reason wants not Horace to support it," 
was one of his characteristic maxims. That his reasons 
were always valid would be too much to claim ; but 
they were always, except when thrown off in the 
caprice of conversation, the result of profound and 
penetrating thought, and he would be a very presump- 
tuous critic that should lightly set them aside. 

" Temporary arrest of poetic expansion " would be a 
fairer description of what took place in the eighteenth 
century than " utter decay of poetry " ; and to assign as 
the explanation of this arrest the overbearing force of 
Pope's example, or the chilling influence of Johnson's 
precepts, or slavish subservience to arbitrary rules is, to 
put it soberly, not to give a sufficient explanation. It 
is not quite fair to criticism to regard it as if its main 
function were to direct and nourish the poetry of the 
period, and to argue that it stands condemned as neces- 
sarily unsound if the contemporary poetical crop is poor 
and scanty. It has been too much the liabit of literary 
historians to look upon the poverty of the poetry as the 
main literary phenomenon of the eighteenth century. 
If the idea had occurred — and it is at least worthy of 
examination — that possibly the critical school of which 
Johnson was the master helped to lay a foundation for 
the splendid outburst of poetic production in a subse- 
quent generation, the critical principles of the eigh- 
teenth century would have had a fairer chance of being 
judged upon their merits. Johnson was certainly no 



THE SUPPOSED TYRANNY OP POPE 333 

champion of narrow and exclusive tenets. There were 
certain obvious and definite qualities in Pope — smooth, 
melodious rhythm, clear sense, elegance or refinement 
of phrase and idea — on which he frequently dwelt as 
high poetic merits. " Here," he exclaimed of Pope's 
" Eloisa," " is particularly observable the curiosa felici- 
tas, a fruitful soil and careful cultivation. Here is no 
crudeness of sense, no asperity of language." But 
highly as he admired such qualities, and although he 
probably did not feel with sufficient force the danger of 
buying them at too great a sacrifice, the absence of 
them did not blind him to other merits. He appreciated 
the power of Collins, though he did find fault with his 
occasional obscurity and his "harsh clusters of conso- 
nants." He found harshness and barbarity in the dic- 
tion of Milton, but that did not prevent him from 
speaking of Milton as "that poet whose works may 
possibly be read when every other monument of British 
greatness is obliterated," or from saying that " such is 
the power of his poetry that his call is obe} r ed without 
resistance, the reader feels himself in captivity to a 
higher and a nobler mind, and criticism sinks in ad- 
miration." With all his love for Pope he found pas- 
sages in Dryden " drawn from a profundity that Pope 
could never reach." He criticised Shakespeare, as he 
said, " without curious malignity or superstitious vener- 
ation," but whoever thinks that he measured Shakes- 
peare by cold and formal notions of correctness should 
read his noble preface. " The work of a correct and 
regular writer is a garden accurately formed and dili- 
gently planted, varied with shades and scented with 
flowers ; the composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in 
which oaks extend their branches and pines tower in 
the air, interspersed sometimes with Aveeds and bram- 
bles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and roses ; 
filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the 
mind with endless diversity." This is not the language 



334 SUPPLEMENT 

of a narrow and exclusive critic with a single eye to 
correctness of an artificial kind. 

The poetic barrenness certainly cannot be explained 
by the predominance of narrow and exclusive critical 
theories. Exclusive admiration of Pope and the classi- 
cal school, contented acquiescence in its methods and 
subjects as the perfection of art, inability to feel and 
enjoy excellence of any other kind, cannot be charged 
against the critics of the time. Pope himself was by 
no means insensible to the greatness of his great pred- 
ecessors, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. 
His conversations with Spence afford abundant evi- 
dence of his catholicity as well as his delicacy of judg- 
ment. And if we pass from Pope to his successors in 
the eighteenth century, we find that we cannot number 
disrespect for Shakespeare among the causes of their 
poetic incompetence, and that Nature was often in their 
heads, if not in their hearts, as the great original from 
which the poet ought to draw. The Winchester school- 
boys, Warton and Collins, were, perhaps, singular in 
their enthusiasm for Spenser. But the cult of Shakes- 
peare was universal. Edition followed edition, and com- 
mentary commentary, while Garrick in Shakespearian 
parts was the delight of the town. When Akenside, in 
the last year of Pope's life, extolled with much ap- 
plause " The Pleasures of the Imagination," he began 
by invoking the aid of " Fancy," as the Spirit of 
Poetry : 

" From the fruitful banks 
Of Avon, whence thy rosy fingers cull 
Fresh flowers and dews to sprinkle on the turf 
Where Shakespeare lies." 

A few years later, in 1749, when a company of French 
players acted by subscription at the Theatre Royal, 
Akenside's enthusiasm was such that he treated their 
visit as an insult to Shakespeare, and put the following 



THE SUPPOSED TYRANNY OF POPE 335 

"Remonstrance" into the mouth of the outraged 
dramatist : 

" What though the footsteps of my devious Muse 
The measured walks of Grecian art refuse ? 
Or though the frankness of my hardy style 
Mock the nice touches of the critic's file ? 
Yet what my age and climate held to view 
Impartial I surveyed and fearless drew. 
And say, ye skilful in the human heart, 
Who know to prize a poet's noblest part, 
What age, what clime, could e'er an ampler field, 
For lofty thought, for daring fancy yield ? " 

The same note was struck by Churchill in the first 
year of the reign of George III. : 

" May not some great extensive genius raise 
The name of Britain 'bove Athenian praise ? . . . 
There may — there hath — and Shakespeare's muse aspires 
Beyond the reach of Greece : with native fires 
Mounting aloft, he wings his daring flight, 
Whilst Sophocles below stands trembling at his height. 
Why should we then abroad for judges roam, 
When abler judges we may find at home ? 
Happy in tragic and in comic powers 
Have we not Shakespeare ? is not Jonson ours ? " 

We have quoted enough to show that the poets of the 
eighteenth century, from beginning to end of what has 
been called the darkest period of the century, were not, 
in principle at least, enamoured of tameness and trimness 
in art, and that they did not of set choice and with de- 
liberate acquiescence confine themselves to a low range 
of imaginative effort. Rather they seem to have been 
striving and straining with turbulent ambition after 
higher things — after things too high for their powers. 
Gray, who had more right to speak than any of those 
whom we have quoted, seems to have been conscious of 
this impotence, this disproportion between desire and 
achievement. 



336 surrLEMENT 

" But not to one in this benighted age 
Is that diviner inspiration given, 
That burns in Shakespeare's and in Milton's page, 
The pomp and prodigality of heaven." 

The difficulty would be to find the critics whose 
authority" the minor poets resented and considered, it 
necessary to abjure. Rymer, who is sometimes referred 
to as if he had been a representative critic of the period, 
was at least as much laughed at in his own generation 
as he has ever been since, and represented only a per- 
verse and splenetic opposition to the general strain. 

The inability of the period to fulfil its aspirations 
after a larger and bolder style of poetry, with more of 
life and passion in it, would be almost pathetic if it were 
really required of every generation to be great in poetry, 
and it were to be held dishonor to come short of great- 
ness in the divine art. The tyrannical authority of a 
critical school cannot be held responsible for this dis- 
honor to the generation after Pope, if dishonor it be. 
The only respect in which criticism may have had a dis- 
couraging influence was this, that there was so much of 
it. Under the lead of Johnson the great aim of criti- 
cism was to discover how the heart was reached, to de- 
tect by analysis of an impressive passage what helped 
and what hindered the effect. "You must show how 
terror is impressed on the human heart," he said, in 
speaking with his friends of what a critic ought to do in 
considering the use made of a ghost in a play : this was 
the onty kind of criticism that he would call real criti- 
cism, "showing the beauty of thought as formed on the 
workings of the human heart." Now, when an artist 
begins to consider too curiously how an effect is pro- 
duced, he is apt to be hampered and, it may be, para- 
lyzed if he has not energy enough to transcend the con- 
sciously or painfully analytic stage, or to perform his 
anatysis with such swiftness and sureness of perception 
that he proceeds at once and as if by instinct to the 



THE SUPPOSED TYRANNY OF POPE 337 

required combination. The amount of poetic produc- 
tion in the generation after Pope may have been les- 
sened by excess of the critical spirit and the multiplica- 
tion of negative conditions, but this could have affected 
only the minor poets or men of poetic talent, because the 
man of poetic genius will not and need not consider his 
ways and means too curiously. 

How are we to account for the arrest of poetry in the 
eighteenth century, if it was not due to the chilling 
influence of critics imbued with artificial principles ? 
Burke's aphorism that " the march of the human mind 
is slow," is a part of the explanation that should not be 
lost sight of in the search for minute causes. Leaps and 
bounds of poetic expansion are not to be expected in 
every generation. Slow progress is the normal law, and 
we need not torture ourselves to discover reasons for a 
particular case of slow progress, as if it were something 
exceptional. After all, there was some progress even in 
poetry itself, besides what may have been done in the 
way of suggestion and collection of material for the 
poetry of the future. Collins and Gray are great 
names, though not of the first rank ; and even in the 
darkest period such minor bards as the Wartons, Shen- 
stone, and Beattie did not merely grind old tunes, but 
sounded a distinctive note, however humble. Collins, 
in especial, added an ever-living branch to the tree of 
our literature : his Odes are not mere dry twigs on that 
tree. Of the peculiar form in which he expressed the 
rapture of learned meditation, gathering together the 
most moving incidents of human experience under ab- 
stractions conceived as living forces, Collins is the 
one great master. He is essentially a scholarly or 
academic poet, and could never be popular in the wide 
sense, his subjects being historical and his mode of 
expression such that he cannot be followed without 
some intellectual effort ; but the effort is worth making, 
because he had deep and genuine feeling to put into his 
22 



338 SUPPLEMENT 

verse, and the power to transmit that feeling, whole and 
harmonious, to the reader. One of Wordsworth's cen- 
tral qualities, his attitude toward Nature, is a natural 
and easy transition from the spirit in which Collins con- 
ceived the pageant of history. 

Great bursts of poetic activity come but seldom. 
They are exceptional facts ; and those anxious rerum 
cognoscere causas should first endeavor to determine the 
causes or leading conditions of those departures from 
the normal law. It should be an easier task, and should 
conduce to the understanding of the comparative inac- 
tivity of other periods. If we take the works of the 
leaders of the great poetic revival of this century, — 
Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron, — we find that they differ 
in certain broad respects from all the works of the 
eighteenth century. We find something like the origi- 
nation of new species or neAv varieties in poetry. The 
form, in a large sense of the word, is new, and the vein 
of feeling is new. New themes are treated in a new 
way, and with a new spirit. Consider the mere form of 
the " Lay of the Last Minstrel," the first genuinely 
popular poem, interesting to all classes, of the new era — 
a metrical romance regularly constructed, with perfect 
unity of action, incidents all helping forward the prog- 
ress of the story through various complications to 
a catastrophe. No such poem had ever been written 
before ; it was a new form in poetry — classical regu- 
larity of form combined with romantic freedom of acci- 
dent. The precepts of the classical school, reiterating 
how an epic, the vain ambition of the poets of the 
eighteenth century, ought to be constructed, were not 
thrown away upon Scott, although he made a free use 
of them. Then the spirit of the poem — the serious epic 
treatment of the necromancing Ladye of Branksome 
Hall, the Wizard, the Goblin Page, and the bold Moss- 
trooper. We have nothing like this in the eighteenth 
century. In Pope's time such personages would either 



THE SUPPOSED TYRANNY OF POPE 339 

have been burlesqued or treated with affected respect, 
such as a grown-up person would use toward fairies and 
hobgoblins in telling stories about them to a child. 
They might have figured in an Ode to Superstition, but 
an artist would hardly have dared to narrate their 
doings with the air of a serious believer, and without 
taking the polite reader into his confidence. Taken 
altogether, in form and spirit, the " Lay " was a new 
thing in literature, a new species of poem. The same 
may be said of " Childe Harold." Here also we find a 
new species of epic, such as the formal writers of epic 
poetry had never contemplated — the hero of which is 
not a mythical king like Arthur, or a personified Virtue 
moving in Faeryland like Spenser's Red Cross Knight, 
or Guyon, or Britomart, but a modern man moving in 
modern scenes. Wordsworth also is new in form as 
well as in spirit. No poet before him had dared to shut 
himself up in the country and choose as the subject of 
his verse, without any reference to his fine friends in 
town, his own personal feelings and reflections as 
aroused by the moving spectacle of sky and hill and 
glen, and the homely life of rustic neighbors. He 
wrote a species of pastoral poetry that had not been 
legislated for by the technical lawgivers of the art, 
though the want of it had been vaguely felt b} r Walsh 
when he wrote wistfully of a Golden Age in which "the 
shepherds were men of learning and refinement." 

Whether or not these are the main characters of the 
new poetry, the vital principles underlying smaller dif- 
ferences, it is in such large new features that we must 
seek the secret of the great expansion rather than in 
little changes of artistic aim or conscious repudiation 
of definite critical theories. The fetters that had to 
be broken were nothing so palpable as formal rules of 
critical authority. They were bonds from which eman- 
cipation is much less easy, the restraints of unformu- 
lated, undogmatic, inarticulate custom. It was habits 



340 SUPPLEMENT 

of feeling that had to be changed, not rules of art. And 
the reason of the comparative poverty of the poetry of 
the eighteenth century was that no poet was born or 
bred with sufficient force of personality to effect this 
change. Probably it could not have been effected with- 
out the invention of forms of poetry that had the broad 
characters of new species, so inveterately were the old 
habits of feeling associated with the old forms, drama, 
epic, descriptive poem, ode, elegy, and sonnet, each hav- 
ing its established unwritten standard of poetic elegance 
or refinement. It is only when some distinctively new 
kind of thing is reached by happy inspiration that 
creative energy is exalted to the pitch that results in a 
great period of poetry. 

The eighteenth century, possibly because the time 
was not ripe, had not inventive energy enough in poetry 
to strike out new lines, but it contributed in many wa} r s 
to make expansion easier for those that came after. 
Especially did the rich and varied development of prose 
in essay and fiction prepare the way for the subsequent 
emancipation. The influence of this prose as a solvent 
of established poetic customs has not been sufficiently re- 
marked. Fift}^ years ago the popular conception of this 
revolution was that it was a literary echo of the French 
Revolution ; that throughout the eighteenth century 
poets had bent submissively under the yoke of Pope and 
the classical school, but that, catching the heat of the 
political ferment, they were emboldened to raise the 
standard of rebellion and throw the rules of their tyrant to 
the winds. But the example of freedom from traditional 
standards of dignity set by prose works of imagination 
and prose comments on life had much more to do with 
the poetic revolution than the contemporary political 
excitement, though this also may have been a factor in 
the result. The serious Muse sat in stiff and starched 
propriety while her nimbler sister revelled in the enjoy- 
ment of freedom, but she tired at last of nursing her 



X 



THE SUPPOSED TYRANNY OF POPE 341 

dignity, and unbent. Prose writers had familiarized 
the world with the subjects and sentiments of the new 
poetry for a generation or two before they attained the 
intensity that seeks expression in verse. The emanci- 
pating influence of the prose literature becomes obvious 
when, disregarding their individualities, we look at the 
general strain of the pioneers and the leaders of the 
poetic revolution. Cowper might be described with 
general truth as an essayist in verse. Wordsworth 
deliberately and articulately claimed liberty to use in 
verse the same diction that might be used for the 
expression of the same feelings in prose ; and incidents 
such as he made the subject of his lyrical ballads had 
for long been considered admissible material for the 
novelist. Characters and incidents similar in kind to 
those in Scott's metrical romances had made their 
appearance before in prose romance. Byron's " Childe 
Harold " was avowedly suggested b} r a character in 
prose fiction ; he intended his hero, he said, to be a 
kind of poetical Zeluco. Prose thus led the way to 
greater freedom of subject and sentiment in poetry, and 
matured the ideas to which poetry gave the higher 
artistic expression. 

It is of some importance that we should understand 
the real nature of the last poetic revival, and see that 
there was more in it than a revolt against established 
poetic diction and artificial critical rules. This oppro- 
brious word artificial has been allowed too long to cre- 
ate a false prejudice against the poetry of the eigh- 
teenth century. It may be doubted whether in any 
important sense of the word the best poetry of the 
eighteenth century was more artificial than the best 
poetry of the nineteenth. The undiscriminating con- 
tempt that at one time sought to justify itself by this 
vague term of reproach, and that was natural enough in 
the exultation of a new movement, has now all but 
passed away, and has given place to a feeling that, after 



342 SUPPLEMENT 

all, the poets of the eighteenth century may be worthy of 
study by those ambitious of still further developments. 
And who knows but that in this once despised period 
inventive genius may yet find a hint and a starting-point 
for fresh triumphs ? 



Ill 

THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS 

The old conception of the Ayrshire ploughman-poet 
undoubtedly was that his poetry had no historical con- 
nection ; that it stands apart as a unique phenomenon, 
entirely unconnected with the main stream of English 
poetry ; that the peasant-poet owed every thing to 
nature, and nothing to books ; that he was a high-priest 
of poetry, without literary father or mother, raised up 
by nature herself ab initio amidst the most disadvan- 
tageous circumstances, as if to put to shame man's feeble 
calculations of means to ends in literary culture. This 
was the old conception, people finding it difficult to 
understand how a ploughman could have trained him- 
self to be a great poet. I do not know how far this 
conception still prevails ; but as something very like it 
is to be found in the famous essay on Burns by another 
great Scotchman of genius, Thomas Carlyle, and as it 
harmonizes with our natural desire to have an element 
of the miraculous in our saints and heroes, it has prob- 
ably survived all the plain facts set forth by the poet's 
biographers. There is in the conception this much 
obvious truth : that Burns owed little to school and 
nothing to college ; but when it is said that nature, and 
nature only, was his school-master (unless the w r ord is 
used in a sense sufficiently wide to include the works of 
man, and among them that work of man called litera- 
ture), the theory does injustice to Burns as an artist, 
and is at variance with the plain facts of his life. 

Supreme excellence in poetry is never attained by a 
sudden leap up from the level of common ideas and 

343 



344 SUPPLEMENT 

common speech, whether a man's every-day neighbors are 
rustic, or men and women of art and fashion and cul- 
ture. The world in which his imagination moves is 
never entirely of his own creation. The great poet 
must have had pioneers from whom he derived some of 
the ideas and resources of his craft — enough, at least, to 
feed and stimulate and direct his own inborn energy. 
Burns, in truth, was a self-taught genius only in the 
sense in which all great artists are so ; those who see in 
the Ayrshire ploughman's mastery of the poetic art any 
rarer miracle than this are those only who attach an 
exaggerated importance to what schools and colleges can 
do in furthering the highest efforts of human genius. 
Beyond a certain point, as we all know, every man must 
be his own school-master ; in this sense nature was the 
school-master of Burns. But, all the same, his poetry is 
not an isolated creation, entirely disconnected from the 
main body of literature. It has its own individuality, 
as the work of all great artists must have ; but it had a 
literary origin, as much as the poetry of Chaucer or 
Shakespeare, or even Pope. When nature has done her 
work, and the unexpected has happened, it is generally 
easy to find something very natural in the means she 
has used to bring the unexpected to pass ; and the very 
circumstances that seemed at first sight to be disadvan- 
tageous to Burns are now seen to have favored him in 
the fulfilment of his mission. 

For a work of genius we require first of all a man of 
genius ; but there are conditions that render the exer- 
cise of his genius possible, and there are influences that 
modify the character and the direction of his work. 
And in the case of literary work these conditions and 
influences are generally found in antecedent literature, 
though not necessarily in the literature of the language 
in which the artist works — literature having really an 
international unity. The course of literature is mainly 
self-contained ; and, in reading its history, the impulse 



THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS 345 

to great work in one generation may often be traced 
back to dimly conceived aims and blind and imperfect 
performances in a previous generation. Nature begins 
her preparations for the advent of a great man long 
before he makes his appearance. 

It is interesting, and it strengthens our sense of the 
unity of literature from generation to generation, to 
trace back in this way the movement that culminated in 
the poetry of Burns to a very humble episode in the 
English poetry of Queen Anne's time — a passing fashion 
for writing what is called pastoral poetry, and a quarrel 
on the subject among the more celebrated wits of the 
day. The fashion had prevailed for some time before in 
France ; in England the starting-point was Dryden's 
translation of Virgil's " Eclogues." To this translation 
was prefixed an elegant discourse on pastoral poetry 
in general by William Walsh, Esq., a gentleman of wit 
and fashion, who wrote in a very neat and pointed style, 
subjected the views of the Frenchman Fontenelle to 
delicate and polite ridicule, and submitted to the public 
with great spirit and elegance his own views of what 
pastoral poetry ought to be. Mr. Walsh's ideal was of 
the most artificial kind, his poetical shepherds being 
men of a golden age, when grazing was the chief in- 
dustry, and shepherds were, as he put it, men of learn- 
ing and refinement, and his chief rules being that an 
air of piety should pervade the pastoral poem, that the 
characters should represent the ancient innocent and 
unpractised plainness of the golden age, and that the 
scenery should be truly pastoral — a beautiful landscape, 
and shepherds, with their flocks round them, piping 
under wide-spreading beech-trees. Pastoral poetry, as 
conceived by Mr. Walsh, who spoke the taste of his age, 
was a species of elegant trifling, something like the 
recent fancy for old French forms of verse (ballades, 
rondeaus, villanelles, and so forth), and nothing might 
have come of it ; but it so happened that Mr. Walsh 



346 SUPPLEMENT 

was the earliest literary friend and counsellor of young 
Mr. Pope, who was persuaded to make his first essay as 
a poet in pastorals, written in strict accordance with 
Walsh's principles, and of that came important conse- 
quences. Pope published in 1709, in a miscellany of 
Dodsley's ; in the same volume appeared also pastorals 
from the pen of Ambrose Philips. Philips, known as 
Namby Pamby, belonged to the coterie of Addison and 
Steele. Between that coterie and Pope arose jealousy 
and strife ; hence when, four years later, Pope produced 
his " Windsor Forest," there appeared in the Guar- 
dian, the organ of the coterie (April, 1713, is the date), 
a series of articles on pastoral poetry, in which Steele 
incidentally gave a roll to the log of friend Namby 
Pamby, who was named as the equal of Theocritus and ; 
Virgil, and ridiculed, by implication, in a polite Queen 
Anne manner, the pastoral poems of young Mr. Pope, 
without mentioning his name. This at least was the 
construction put upon the matter b}' Pope, who took a 
clever and amusing revenge of a kind to cause a great 
deal of talk about the Guardian articles. It was an 
amusing literary quarrel ; but Steele's theory of pastoral 
poetry, thus occasionally produced, had more fruitful 
results. The numbers of the Guardian really set forth 
for the first time a fresh theory for that kind of compo- 
sition, to the effect that in English pastoral poetry the 
characters should be not classical shepherds and shep- 
herdesses, — Corydon and Phyllis, Tityrus and Amaryllis, 
— but real English rustics ; that the scenery should be 
real English scenery ; and that the manners and super- 
stitions should be such as are to be found in English 
rural life. 

Nothing was done to realize this theory in England 
till the time of Crabbe and Wordsworth (Gay merely 
burlesqued it in his "Shepherd's Week"), but it so hap- 
pened that it was taken seriously in Scotland. At the 
time when the Guardian articles appeared there was 



THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS 347 

a social club in Edinburgh, named The Easy Club, 
which followed the literary movements of London with 
keen interest ; and of this club Allan Ramsay was poet- 
laureate. Allan also wrote pastoral elegies d la mode, 
neither better nor worse than the artificial stuff then in 
fashion ; but in a happy hour he thought of trying his 
hand at the real pastoral, as conceived by Steele, and 
produced "The Gentle Shepherd." Thus, out of a 
passing literary fashion and a literary quarrel came the 
original impulse to the composition of a work that must 
be numbered among the conditions that made the poetry 
of Burns possible. For no less honor than this can be 
claimed for Ramsay's pastoral comedy. Carlyle says 
somewhere that a man of genius is always impossible 
until he appears. This is quite true, out it is only a 
half truth ; and the other half is that a man of genius 
must always be possible before he appears. Favorable 
conditions for the exercise of his genius will not produce 
the man ; but if the favorable conditions are not there 
when he appears, his genius will be stifled, and he will 
remain mute and inglorious. 

Ramsay's " Gentle Shepherd " became, in the genera- 
tion before Burns, one of the most popular books among 
the peasantry of Scotland, finding a place, it is said, 
beside the Bible in every ploughman's cottage and shep- 
herd's sheilling ; and it may be said to have created the 
atmosphere in which the genius of Burns thrived and 
grew to such proportions. It did this by idealizing rural 
life in Scotland, by giving the ploughman a status in 
the world of the imagination. It enabled him, as it 
were, to hold his head higher among his fellow-creatures, 
and opened his eyes to the elements of poetry in his 
hard, earth-stained, and weather-beaten existence. " His 
rustic friend," Carlyle says, in speaking of Burns and 
the boundless love that was in him, " his nut-brown 
maiden, are no longer mean and homely, but a hero and 
a queen, to be ranked with the paragons of earth." 



348 SUPPLEMENT 

But it was Ramsay who first threw the golden light of 
poetry on the peasant lads and lasses of Scotland, and 
made heroes and heroines of Patie and Roger and Jenny 
and Peggy, and who thus created the atmosphere 
through which Burns saw them. No more striking 
proof of the power of literature to transform life can be 
given than the fact that half a century before the advent 
of Burns he was preceded by an ideal prototype in " The 
Gentle Shepherd." Ramsay's description of his hero 
might pass for a description of the real Burns, only that 
nature asserted her supremacy by making the reality 
more astonishing than any thing that the imagination of 
Ramsay, governed as it was by the genteel spirit of the 
time, had dared to put into verse. 

Burns owed much to Allan Ramsay, and something 
also to another Scottish poet, to whom he erected a 
memorial stone in Canongate Churchyard, Edinburgh — 
the ill-fated Fergusson ; but to say, with Carlyle, that 
he had " for his onty standard of beauty the rhymes of 
Ramsay and Fergusson " is to miss altogether his true 
relation to the main body of English literature. His 
only standard of beauty ! This is indeed to underrate 
the extent of the ploughman's self-education. I need 
hardly remind you of the studious habits of the Burns 
family, upon which all his biographers dwell ; how their 
severe rule of bodily labor was combined with a rule of 
mental labor no less strictly and strenuously observed 
because it was voluntary ; how they carried books in 
their pockets to read whenever their hands were free 
from farm-work ; how neighbors found them at their 
meals with spoon in one hand and book in the other. 
There is nothing, indeed, that impresses us more with a 
sense of the gigantic force of the personality of Burns 
and the breadth of his manhood than the thought that 
with all the strength of his youthful passion for reading, 
tending, as it did, to detach him from his unlettered 
neighbors, it should not have converted him into a self- 



THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS 349 

opinionated prig or a snarling pedant. What saved 
him from this fate was that he absorbed books, and was 
not absorbed by them ; he was saved, probably, by that 
craving for distinction of which he spoke more than 
once as his ruling passion, that thirst for admiring sym- 
pathy of living men and living women which made him 
appropriate and turn to his own uses what he found in 
books. That, probably, saved him from having loads 
of learned lumber in his head. However this may be, 
the actual result was that Burns in those early years of 
intense and devouring study, ranging far beyond Ram- 
say and Fergusson, trained himself to be a great artist by 
mastering and rendering to harmonious practice the best 
critical ideas of his century. 

The secret of Burns's enduring and still growing 
fame is that he was the greatest poetic artist of his 
century ; and I would submit the proposition that he 
was so, not because he stood outside the main current 
of his century, and drew his inspiration solely from 
nature, meaning by nature untutored impulse, but 
because he took into his mind from books, and succeeded 
by the force of his genius and the happ}* - accident of his 
position in reconciling two elementary principles of 
poetry that weaker intellects cannot keep from drifting 
into antagonism and mutual injury. One of these prin- 
ciples is that with which we are familiar in eighteenth- 
century literature, under the name of "correctness," 
which is only another name for perfection of expression, 
in so far as that can be attained by laborious self- 
criticism. When Pope began to write, he was advised 
by his friend Walsh, to whom I have already referred, 
to aim at correctness : the ancients had said every thing, 
and there was nothing left for the modern poet but to 
improve upon their manner of saying it. In his " Essay 
on Criticism " Pope embodied this idea in a couplet : 

" True wit is nature to advantage dressed, 
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." 



350 SUPPLEMENT 

This is one principle ; the other is that art must follow 
nature. It is a common opinion that the eighteenth-cen- 
tury poets were alive only to the first of these principles. 
But this will not bear examination ; the sovereignty 
of nature was formally proclaimed by Pope, as well as 
the artistic doctrine of dressing her to advantage : 

" First follow nature, and your judgment frame 
By her just standard, which is still the same : 
Unerring nature, still divinely bright, 
One clear, unchanged, and universal light, 
Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart, 
At once the source, and end, and test of art." 

This was Pope's theory, and in the generation between 
Pope and Burns the importance of following nature and 
the vanity of artificial rules were insisted on with 
untiring enthusiasm by poets and critics alike. But till 
Burns arose no poetic aspirant was found, with the 
doubtful exception of Collins, capable of reconciling 
the conflicting claims of nature and art in practice. 
Gray was stifled by too fastidious a desire for correct- 
ness ; Thomson, Akenside, Shenstone, and the Wartons 
had abundant enthusiasm for nature, but insufficient art. 
It was not, indeed, their poetic principles that undid the 
correct school ; it was rather the artificial taste, the fear 
of vulgarity, the liking for something elevated above 
the vulgar style, among the audience for which they 
wrote ; and this led them into what was really a viola- 
tion of Pope's principle of aiming at what oft was 
thought, induced them to search for what seldom was 
thought, and to avoid what was never expressed in 
polite society. Burns was more fortunate in his audi- 
ence, although he worked on the same principles, and 
found both warrant and guidance in Pope's "Essay on 
Criticism." 

At first sight it might seem that Burns was all on the 
side of the naturalists : 



THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS 351 

" Gie me ae touch o' nature's fire, 
That's a' the learning I desire." 

This aspiration is sometimes quoted as if it distinguished 
Burns from his artificial eighteenth-century predecessors, 
and as if it were the secret of his greatness ; but really 
there is nothing singular in it : it might be paralleled 
from every poet and poetaster between Pope and him- 
self. We are all willing to throw upon nature the labor 
that nature requires from us. It was not the touch of 
nature's fire alone that made Burns the great artist he 
was ; it was the happy combination of this with an 
indomitable effort after perfection of expression. That 
Burns had natural fire there is no question ; every-body 
feels it in his poetry, and every-body allows that the 
touch of nature's fire is indispensable. But Burns had 
courage enough to recognize that the possession of 
natural fire did not absolve him from the necessity of 
resolute artistic discipline ; and his distinction lies in 
this, that he had strength enough to undergo the dis- 
cipline without losing his hold on nature. How many 
of his songs fulfil in substance Pope's ideal — 

" What oft was thought, hut ne'er so well expressed " — 

"Auld Lang Syne," "Ye Banks and Braes," "Scots 
wha hae," " John Anderson," " Tarn Glen," " Duncan 
Gray." And if we either look at his poems in relation 
to the works of his predecessors, or study his recorded 
habits of composition, it is easy to see that it was not 
by trusting to natural impulse alone that he attained 
this perfection of expression. " It is an excellent 
method in a poet," he says, in one of his letters, " and 
what I believe every poet does, to place some favorite 
classic author, in his walks of study and composition, 
before him as a model." This was obviously his own 
practice. For almost every one of his poems he had a 
precedent in general form as well as in metre : for 
"The Twa Dogs" and "Tarn o' Shanter," Allan 



352 SUPPLEMENT 

Ramsay's fables, the "Twa Books" and "The Three 
Bonnets " ; for " Hallowe'en," Fergusson's " Hallow 
Fair" ; for "The Cottar's Saturday Night," Fergusson's 
" Farmer's Ingle," and so on. Even for his interchange 
of rhyming epistles with brother bards, which were 
dashed, as he said, " clean aff loof," he had the prec- 
edent of Fergusson's correspondence with J. S. It 
would almost seem as if he never wrote except with 
some precedent in his eye, therein approving himself the 
genuine child of the critical principles and practice of 
Pope. Not, be it remembered, that he kept his prec- 
edent before him for servile imitation ; it was before 
his mind rather as a stimulating rival, to be beaten on 
its own ground by superior natural force, higher art, 
or happier choice of theme. There is no better way of 
reviving our sense of the force of Burns's genius, if it 
should happen to get blunted by too prolonged famili- 
arity, than putting his work alongside the precedent with 
Avhich it competes. He did not waste his strength in 
searching for new types or strange topics ; he tried to 
improve upon the old. "I have no doubt," he wrote 
to Dr. Moore (in 1789), "but the knack, the aptitude, 
to learn the Muses' trade, is a gift bestowed by Him 
' who forms the secret bias of the soul ' ; but I as 
firmty believe that excellence in the profession is the 
fruit of industry, labor, attention, and pains." And a 
description by himself of his habits at the age of sixteen 
gives us some idea of the kind of pains that he took, 
from a very early period, in his self-education to the 
office of poet : "A collection of English songs was my 
vacle mecum. I pored over them driving my cart, or 
walking to labor, song by song, verse by verse ; care- 
fully noting the true, tender, or sublime, from affecta- 
tion or fustian." There we see the artist at work, 
laboriously building up for himself a standard of per- 
fection in expression, and boldly applying nature as the 
test of art. 



THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS 353 

Ten years later, at the age of twenty-six, in the win- 
ter of 1785, stimulated by the intention of "appearing 
in the public character of an author," Burns poured 
forth poem after poem with marvellous rapidity; and, 
seeing that much of his best work was produced then, 
his easy, impetuous speed has been contrasted with the 
laborious care of his eighteenth-century predecessors, 
and it has been supposed that this speed was the secret 
of his success. But those who argue thus forget the 
long previous years of discipline to which the poet, with 
all his ardor of imagination, had bad the strength of 
will to subject himself. In the same way we are apt to 
marvel at the ease and certainty of touch of a rapid 
painter, and forget the pains that it took him to acquire 
such mastery. There are few remains of Burns's appren- 
tice work, because most of it was done in his head as he 
followed the plough or walked beside his cart, or strolled 
or lay in his scanty leisure on banks and braes. 

But it is possible sometimes to trace a succession of 
tries with a favorite idea, till at last he found a perfectly 
satisfactory setting for it. The line : 

" But seas between us braid bae roared " — 

is perfectly balanced in its place in " Auld Lang Sjme " 
against the companion line : 

" We twa bae paidl't in the burn." 

But the ocean's roar had done duty in more than one of 
his earlier and less perfect poems before it was happily 
settled in its present connection. At that desperate 
crisis in his life when he proposed to expatriate himself, 
and took a passage to the West Indies, he addressed the 
following lines to Jean Armour : 

" Though mountains rise and deserts howl, 
And oceans roar between, 
Yet dearer than my deathless soul 
Still will I love my Jean." 

23 



354 SUPPLEMENT 

We find the same idea in another poem of the same 
date : 

" Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary, 
And leave auld Scotia's shore ? 
Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary, 
Across the Atlantic's roar ? " 

The idea occurs in still another poem, also written about 
the same time : 

" From thee, Eliza, I must go, 
And from my native shore ; 
The cruel fates between us throw 
A boundless ocean's roar ; 

" But boundless oceans, roaring wide, 
Between my love and me, 
They never, never can divide 
My heart and soul from thee." 

I am afraid these quotations illustrate rather more than 
the poet's artistic practice ; but they show at least that 
he was very constant as an artist, if not as a man. 

Burns not only studied his art in books, and measured 
himself against established masters with resolute emula- 
tion and, we may well believe, a glorious joy in his own 
powers, but, living as he did in his youth from morning 
till night, day after day, in a world of the imagination, 
with books for his constant companions, he seems to 
have been influenced by books as few men have been in 
his whole attitude toward life and his leading poetic 
themes. He carried into his daily intercourse with plain 
country-folk, who were his neighbors under the real sky, 
ideals derived from this artificial world ; from it he 
drew his sustenance ; it was the source of the strength 
that lay behind the outward man. Mr. Robert Louis 
Stevenson, in one of his "Familiar Studies of Men and 
Books," draws an artistically harmonious and carefully 
finished picture of Burns as Rab the Ranter, imaging 
him as a rustic Don Juan or an Ayrshire Theophile 



THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS 355 

Gautier. It is recorded that the farmer's son of Lochlea 
had, when a youth of twenty-one, the only tied hair in 
the parish of Tarbolton, and wore a plaid of a particular 
color, arranged in a particular manner round his shoul- 
ders. This little peculiarity Mr. Stevenson happily in- 
terprets as a sign of the poet's kinship in temperament 
with the self-reliant artist, Avho is not averse to public 
attention, but rather wishes to force his personality on 
the world. The comparison with Gautier is so far 
happy and suggestive that it puts proper emphasis on 
the artistic side of the poet's nature ; it keeps us from 
forgetting that the Ayrshire ploughman was, above every 
thing, an artist, and, by force of artistic temperament 
and habit, not a little of a poser. Mr. Stevenson's 
diagnosis of the tied hair and the particular plaid as 
artistic symptoms is good, and one could wish, in his 
review of Burns's love affairs and lovedetters, to have had 
more of the same happy vein of interpretation — to have 
had more of the artist brought into prominence, and less 
of the professional Don Juan. But the truth is that 
any comparison of Burns to Don Juan or the magnifi- 
cent leaders of the romantic movement in France is ana- 
chronistic, and, so far, misleading. Though these had 
something in common with Burns, they were later devel- 
opments, with marked modifications of race and circum- 
stances ; and if we go farther back, we shall find not 
merely parallels, but prototypes, that had a direct influ- 
ence in making Burns what he was. Rab the Ranter, 
the "rantin' rovih"' boy that was born of the poet's 
imagination in Kyle, and was the " worser spirit" of his 
conduct, was the lineal descendant of the roaring boys 
of the Elizabethan time and the swaggering wits and 
beaux of the days of King Charles II.; but his nearest 
relations are to be found in the poetry and fiction that 
held the literary field when Burns was young. Rab the 
Ranter is first cousin to Tom Jones and Roderick Ran- 
dom and Charles Surface, and was probably acquainted 



356 SUPPLEMENT 

with his relations ; his own immediate parent was, as I 
have already indicated, the hero of Allan Ramsay's pas- 
toral comedy, " The Gentle Shepherd " Patie, a rat- 
tleskull, 

" A very deil that aye maun hae his •will," 

a king among his fellows by virtue of a natural air of 
superiority, a rhymer and a singer, bold of address, glib 
of tongue, an adept in chaffing the lasses, irresistible in 
his arts of courtship, but, with all this, a student, "read- 
ing fell books that teach him meikle skill," familiar 
with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, with poems, histories, 
and plays — " reading," as Ramsay says in his homely 
phrase : 

" Reading such books as raise a peasant's mind 
Above a lord's that is not so inclined." 

All the roaring boys of eighteenth-century poetry and 
fiction are distinguished by a certain goodness of heart, 
and an active scorn of meanness and hypocrisy ; they 
have strong natural affections ; they are full of com- 
punction for the victims of their warm-blooded reckless- 
ness. In short, they are all believers in " Rab's " ethical 
creed : 

" The heart aye's the part aye 
That keeps us richt or wrang." 

In so far as the poet was a rantin' rovin' Robin, this 
was his literary lineage and consanguinity. But the 
real Burns had a strain in him that would not permit 
him to be a light-hearted roaring boy. Rab the Ranter 
represented only one of his moods — a mood indulged 
rather in a spirit of defiance than with thorough enjoy- 
ment, as in one to the manner born. Burns was the 
son of the pious cottar whose Saturday night he cele- 
brated, and he could not remain long at ease in the Zion 



THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS 357 

of the ranters, however heartily he let himself go, and 
however splendid his powers of expression were when 
he was in the vein. He was the author of the addresses 
" To a Mouse " and " To a Mountain Daisy," as well as 
of "Tain o'Shanter" and "The Jolly Beggars"; he 
was the "Man of Feeling," as well as " Rab the Ranter." 
One of his most marked qualities is that which Carlyle 
expresses with such eloquence of admiration, his large- 
hearted sensibility, his boundless love of mankind, his 
warm and ready sympathy for poor outcast, defenceless 
creatures exposed to misfortune's bitter blast, a sym- 
pathy generous enough to embrace and make allowance 
for even the enemies of the well-conducted animal 
world — the prowling wolf and the devil himself. Herein, 
also, Burns was not singular ; here, also, we find him the 
poet of 

" What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed " 

in his time. When Burns wrote, sensibility or senti- 
mentality — tenderness for the woes of the unfortunate, 
especially for sufferings that could not be relieved, or 
for which no relief was possible but a compassionate 
tear — was, and had been for several years, a ruling 
fashion in literature. Sensibility was a favorite virtue 
in the heroines, and even in the heroes, of the romances 
of the time. Sterne's " Sentimental Journey," and 
Mackenzie's " Man of Feeling," still stand out among 
the numerous contemporary writings in the same vein. 
"Dear sensibility!" cries Sterne, "source inexhausted 
of all that is precious in our joys or costly in our sor- 
rows ! . . . Thou givest a portion of it sometimes to the 
roughest peasant who traverses the bleakest mountains. 
He finds the lacerated lamb of another's flock. This 
moment I behold him, leaning with his head against his 
crook, with piteous inclination, looking down upon it ! 
1 Oh, had I come one moment sooner ! ' " Sterne and 
Mackenzie were favorite authors with Burns ; he wore 



358 SUPPLEMENT 

out two copies of " The Man of Feeling," canning 
it about in his pocket to read at odd times. 

But the reader may ask, Am I not reducing Burns, 
the child of nature, the heaven-taught poet, to a mere 
creature of books? Would the lad that was born in 
Kyle not have been a " rantin' rovin'" boy all the same 
if there had been no such character in literature to 
catch his imagination and sway his conduct ? Would 
he not have been a " man of feeling " if Sterne and 
Mackenzie had never written a line ? Possibty ; all 
that I suggest is that, apart from any question of what 
might have been, books did, as a matter of fact, influ- 
ence both his character and his choice of poetical themes. 
The nature, of course, must have been there before he 
could have been thus influenced, the natural affinity 
with what he absorbed from books, the germ that the 
" potency of life " in them, to use Milton's phrase, 
quickened and expanded. That Burns would have felt 
pity for the poor mouse whose dwelling had been 
ruined by his fell ploughshare, even if he had been 
absolutely illiterate, we can well believe ; but that he 
would have written a poetic address to the mouse if he 
had not been steeped in the literature of sensibility is 
open to question. I merely afford an illustration of the 
truth expressed in Fletcher of Saltoun's famous saying : 
" Let me make the ballads of a nation, and I care not 
who makes its laws." Only Fletcher spoke of popular 
music-hall songs, and the remark admits of a much 
wider application — an application as wide as Milton 
gave it in his " Essay on the Liberty of Unlicensed 
Printing": "For books are not absolutely dead things, 
but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active 
as that soule was whose progeny they are ; nay, they 
do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extrac- 
tion of that living intellect that bred them. . . As 
good almost kill a man as kill a good book." 

I do not mean that Burns owed every thing to books. 



THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS 359 

In virtue of his artistic temperament be was peculiarly 
susceptible to influences of all kinds, to ideas current in 
the minds of living men, as well as to ideas preserved 
in boohs ; but books exercised a paramount influence 
upon him, because as a poet or artist in words he, more 
than the generality of men, lived and moved and had 
his being in the atmosphere of books. We have his 
own direct testimony to this, even if it was not to be 
divined f rom his artistic temperament, and the study of 
his works in relation to his contemporaries. 

Take an example or two. We find him at a time 
when things were not going well with him writing as 
follows to his friend Robert Ainslie : 

" Let me quote you my two favourite passages, which, though 1 
have repeated them ten thousand times, still they rouse my manhood 
and steel my resolution like inspiration : 

" ' On Reason build resolve, 
That column of true majesty in man.' 

— YOUNG. 

" 'Here, Alfred, hero of the State, 

Thy genius heaven's high will declare : 
The triumph of the truly great 
Is never, never to despair ! 
Is never to despair ! ' 

—Thomson, ' Masque of Alfred.'" 

For many men, most men, perhaps, such high-sounding 
phrases are hollow and pointless, brass sounds and noth- 
ing more ; for Burns they obviously had " a potency 
of life." A letter to Murdoch earlier in his career is 
still more significant of the support he received from 
books, turning poetry to the use that the late Mr. 
Matthew Arnold was never weary of recommending : 

" My favourite authors are of the sentimental kind, such as 
Shenstone, particularly his ' Elegies ' ; Thomson ; ' Man of 
Feeling,' a book I prize next to the Bible ; ' Man of the World'; 
Sterne, especially his 'Sentimental Journey'; Macpherson's 
' Ossian,' &c. These are the glorious models after whicli I 



360 SUPPLEMENT 

endeavour to form my conduct ; and 'tis incongruous, 'tis absurd 
to suppose that the man whose mind glows with sentiments 
lighted up at their sacred flame — the man whose heart distends 
with benevolence to all the human race, he 'who can soar above 
this little scene of things ' — can he descend to mind the paltry 
concerns about which the terrse-filial race fret and fume and vex 
themselves ! O, how the glorious triumph swells my heart ! 
I forget that I am a poor, insignificant devil, unnoticed and 
unknown, stalking up and down fairs and markets, when I 
happen to be in them, reading a page or two of mankind, and 
' catching the manners living as they rise,' whilst the men of 
business jostle me on every side as an idle incumbrance in their 
way." 

Through that frank letter we can look as through an 
open window into the heart of Burns as it was at the 
age of twenty-four, and it helps us to understand why 
he failed as a farmer and why he succeeded as a poet, 
because it shows us how resolutely his heart was set on 
one ambition, and how entirely his mind was occupied 
with the world of the imagination. At that date the 
ranter strain in Burns's character was but very partially 
developed ; we can see that the " man of feeling " was 
then uppermost ; and we can note, also, the working in 
his mind of another favorite ideal of the time, — a favor- 
ite ideal among artists at all times, — that of the specta- 
tor, the observer, who comes down from his world of 
dreams and meditations to read in the great book of 
mankind. 

Any thing that I have said would lead very far from 
my meaning if it conveyed the impression that Burns 
neglected to study either man or nature from the life. 
My theory, if any thing so obvious can be dignified with 
the name of theory, onty is that it was from literature 
that his genius received the original impulse and bent 
to that study by which literature was so much enriched. 
His poetry is not a mere freak of nature, a thing sui 
generis, but an organic part of the body of English 
literature, with its attachments or points of connection 



THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS 361 

only slightly disguised by difference of dialect. It drew 
its inspiration from literature, and it became in its turn 
a fruitful source of inspiration to two great poets of 
the next generation, Wordsworth and Byron. One 
main secret of Bryon's fascination was the frank 
sincerity with which he laid bare his own personal 
feelings to the world, abandoning the timid reserve, 
the polite reticence about self, that had been the ruling 
tradition of the eighteenth century ; and it may be 
doubted whether, with all his impetuous strength and 
defiant pride, Byron would have broken so completely 
with this tradition if Burns had not led the way. It is 
with the " nobly pensive" side of Burns, with Burns as 
the "man of feeling," that Wordsworth connects him- 
self ; and it may be doubted whether Wordsworth 
would have reached the conviction which is the root 
and source of so much of his best work, that : 

" Nature for all conditions wants not power 
To consecrate, if we have eyes to see 
The outside of her creatures, and to breathe 
Grandeur upon the very humblest face 
Of human life" — 

it may be doubted whether Wordsworth would have 
reached this conviction as an inspiring principle of 
fresh poetic work if Burns had not first taught him, to 
use his own words in acknowledging the obligation : 

" How verse may build a princely throne 
On humble truth." 

Carlyle, in his celebrated essay on Burns, in which, 
with all its eloquence, he seems to me to speak far too 
disparagingly of Burns's actual achievement as a poet, 
regrets that his father's circumstances did not permit 
him to reach the university, and conjectures that he 
might then have " come forth not as a rustic wonder, 
but as a regular well-trained intellectual workman, and 



362 SUPPLEMENT 

changed the whole course of English literature." But, 
after all, as it was, Burns did something like this. I do 
not myself believe in the possibility of revolutionary 
changes in literature ; the history of literature is the 
history of a gradual development, advancing often, no 
doubt, by leaps and bounds, but always by natural 
transition from one stage to another. I doubt, there- 
fore, whether Burns would have " changed the whole 
course of English literature " if he had gone to a 
university ; but, as it was, he exercised an important 
influence on that literature, and it is at least probable 
that he would have been hindered rather than helped in 
that mission if his education had been different from 
what it was. He might have been a happier man 
otherwise, but it may be doubted whether he would 
have been a greater poet. 



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